The Future of the 9th Frame (continued)

I'm back. (Temporarily at least.)

So I've been thinking about this blog and where I wanted to take it (if anywhere) now that the election is over. I proposed some options in my last post that generated several comments. Many thanks. I haven't made any decisions yet, but here are my thoughts right now:

A. Guest authors. Some people have mentioned contributing to this site for many months. I'm inclined to do this eventually, BUT I'm not sure how attention this blog would generate. The 7-10 is my main blog. It has far more subscribers and a far larger readership than The 9th Frame. If a guest poster put something up here, I'm not sure how many people would read it. The 7-10 is much closer to reaching critical mass. So until this blog becomes more established and more popular, I'm not inclined to open it up to guest authors because I don't want people to invest a lot of time contributing to a community that is not quite there yet. Of course, adding diverse content may be what draws people to the site in the future, but I don't yet have enough time to serve as a blog administrator. So the short answer is, I want to open this blog up to guest authors, but not just yet out of fairness to you, this blog, and my own schedule.

B. Continuing The 9th Frame as a part of The 7-10. This is not an option. The 7-10 is a syndicated blog and has a certain "brand image" to maintain. So I'm not really at liberty to start injecting snark and three-sentence posts there. Doing so would result in being dropped from Newstex and other blog aggregator/syndication sites.

C. Multimedia as a part of The 7-10. This is more of an aesthetics vs. convenience decision. The 7-10 loads very quickly. For readers who don't have broadband access or who have slow or disrupted internet connections, that blog works great as is. But I also understand that adding a bit of color in the form of multimedia may make it more visually appealing. What I do at The 7-10 now is simply provide links to the relevant pictures or videos. One site that is a hybrid of The 7-10 and The 9th Frame is a site based in Nebraska called Political Realm. That site provides mostly detailed analysis, but also includes a lot of multimedia elements and a few short posts. Sometimes Political Realm doesn't load as quickly because of all the videos there, however. But it's a very good site that I check regularly. The Rothenberg Political Report, created by professional political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, has no multimedia content whatsoever. That site looks more like The 7-10. My inclination is that political junkies are more inclined to look for sites like the Rothenberg Political Report, but more casual followers of politics are more interested in sites like Political Realm. The 9th Frame seems to have a different set of followers than The 7-10. So I'll really have to think about this.

D. Keep The 9th Frame, but update it less often. This is the direction I'm leaning in. I still have occasional thoughts to share, but updating this blog the way I was doing earlier this fall (3-5 posts per day!) is not going to happen anymore. To fill the void, I could add the guest posting element, but that brings me back to the amount of time I want to invest in this site.

E. Shut this blog down. That's not an option. Politics will always go on, and so should political blogging.

So basically, I'm likely to pursue Option D, but have not ruled out Options A and C. Thoughts?