Posting pics of food is classified as personal because John is eating the food and we can associate the food with John.

Jeremy owns an MMA site and has sponsored fighters and even hangs around with some on occassion, so we can classify that as personal-related as well.

I posted a video of myself shaving (with my new razor) a number of weeks back and I consider that personal because I’m the one shaving.

As long as you can directly relate yourself to the off-topic material and you think it is interesting to your readers than I consider that as personal.

So, for Nima, if he had showed us a video of himself in a day at his Farsi calligraphy school, I’d consider that much more interesting than simply seeing “random” Farsi poetry which has no meaning to those of us with no knowledge of the art.

I guess the key is, if you’re going to post something off-topic, make sure that either the majority of your readers can connect with it and find it interesting, or else make sure you’re directly connected to it somehow.

With that said, the Top Dog bloggers seem to keep the off-topics to just one or two consistent areas. Not posting ever mundane detail.

For Nima, consistency seems to be the key advice. Consistency on number and frequency of posts, consistency of topic areas, etc.