Selecting a topic for your blog

There are a lot of blogs about blogging, so I've been reading a bit about selecting a goal and a subject for your blog. Conventional wisdom is that you should select a niche topic to stand out from the crowd. If you spend a lot of time at home making beautiful cakes anyway, why not blog about it? Add a nice photo of each cake to your blog post and you can be sure that a select group of cake aficionados will read your every post and drool about it.

Personally I think that niche topics are overrated, very 2007. A blog like that will probably look great, but require a corresponding time investment. You'd better enjoy all the attention those 17 fanatical followers are giving your blog, because that's all you will get with those mile-long posts like '100 tips to get a great glaze'. Needless to say I don't make cakes at home, or any of those easy to visualize things, which also prevents me from going this route. But that doesn't matter. I firmly believe that we live in the Age of Search, and that even if you blog about totally random subjects your posts will be found by readers, in particular if those posts are practical and to the point. So, I will use this reasoning as an excuse for a more or less random(1) selection of topics, and I plan to be amazed by the large numbers of readers flocking to each post. I'll let you know how that works out in a few months.

(1) At least some posts will be about web application development, agile project management and investment.