I’ve been reading The Plenitude by Rich Gold,
and in it he talks about the subcategories of art as being
three hats that an artist could wear.

While reading it, I realized the same could be said for
both blogging in general and bloggers in particular.

The first hat is the beret,
which he associates with the fine arts.

The beret bloggers tend to be,
but are not limited to, A-list bloggers.

Actually, any blogger with a sufficiently
supertypical existence can become a beret blogger.

The content of a beret blog is suffficiently compelling
in and of itself aside from any reference to others,
be it born of a person’s life (Scobleizer, Instapundit)
or of a project (Post Secret, et al).

Many people like to think they are beret bloggers,
but, alas, are not….

The second hat is the baseball cap, which he associates with popular art.

The baseball cap bloggers tend to be
the bloggers who use blogging as a means to
achieve something else
(i.e. sell books, run ads, do affiliate marketing, promote a business, etc).

The content of a baseball cap blog springs,
not from the blogger’s life, but from what the blogger percieves
to be a topic, product or service that has market demand
and can be monetized.

Examples range from made-for-AdSense article niche sites
to industry blogs serving a well defined niche with content
optimized for search engines and ad placement optimized for revenue.

Many blogs incorporate various baseball cap techniques,
but aren’t truly baseball cap blogs.

The third hat is the straw hat, which he uses to represent folk art.

The straw hat blogger is the most common of all the bloggers mentioned here.

The straw hat bloggers blog mostly for themselves and friends.

Among the types of straw hat blogs are:
noodle blogs (what I had for lunch), online diaries,
cat blogs (look – more pictures of my cat),
and most (but not all) Xanga, Livejournal, Facebook and MySpace pages.