The new "blog magazine" trend.

Stephen Bainbridge is back from his blogging hiatus and has revamped his bloggage into "a blog magazine in three sections." The professional is separated from the personal, and the wine is in another place altogether. Good idea? Personally, I like one blog with mixed topics, but I can see how someone else might prefer to highlight a topic (like wine) and to keep the professional part completely professional. It's likely to be more comprehensible to colleagues, and there probably are some people who would only be interested in following you down one path but not the others. But you lose the surprise of the mix.

Bainbridge keeps his Site Meter private, so we can't see, but it will be interesting for him to see what entry and exit pages people are using. I would expect the personal blog to get the most readers -- it's the one I'm blogrolling -- because culture, religion, and politics interest people so much. If the corporate law blog gets relatively low numbers, he will surely -- and fairly -- assume these are high quality readers, people whose admiration will help him professionally.

Is Bainbridge's way the way of the future? We shall see. It's one way. I think it will appeal to some who blog a lot -- most people can't keep up three blogs -- and who want to write about their professional subject in a style that they worry is not entertaining enough for lay readers or who want to maximize the credit they get for the professional writing they are doing on the blog. It may work as a way to get more of your colleagues to read your blog. Some of them probably don't want to wade through the daily posts to see what you are writing about law.