Thursday, October 12, 2006

Why blog? (Chapter Four)

I was reading a few Wiki entries on blogging that a friend at work pointed me toward, after I pointed him toward my blog. One of the many interesting angles offered up to me there was a consideration of the frequency of blog entries, and the effect thereof. Apparently the more often you blog, the more likely it is that you'll (slowly, over months and months) build up a readership. I hadn't really thought about that when I started down this road, but upon reflection I realized that it's right in line with how I act as a consumer of blogs, and webpages in general. While I have lots of sites bookmarked, I almost instinctively figured out along the way that it's only worth the effort to check out the ones that update regularly, and ignore the rest except when I'm looking for something specific. This is probably something every teenager today had burned into their brain by the time they hit the age of 8, but it was still mildly revelatory to me (at 43).

Of course, if I blog five times a day but it's slightly less entertaining than watching grass grow, it probably won't matter. Since I really can't predict what other people will find interesting, I'll continue to aim to make it appealing to me, and hope that others choose to come along for the ride.

And speaking of grass growing, did I mention it snowed on my bike ride home today?

3 comments:

Tammy said...

Back in the day, I used to update my blog quite regularly and at my peak had a fairly substantial readership (think 7 comments on the most boring of entries, 20+ on the good ones). But I got busy or bored with blogging, or both, and started updating about once every couple of months. Then I picked up again about 6 months ago to discover not many people actually read my blog anymore!

Anyways, ick to the snow. I was sitting in class facing a set of windows so I saw it right away and was pretty sure I had just dozed off in class! Hope it doesn't keep up.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Good background info to get from a veteran blogger! It certainly jibes with what I read, and what I've seen in my own reading habits. We'll have to see how much stick-with-itness I manage here, and what kind of readers (if any) I pick up along the way.

Tammy said...

Who knows you could have already developed a dozen fans in Asia. If they don't leave comments it's hard to know who's actually reading it, unless you install some kind of site tracker. On xanga they have this interesting feature called Footprints that let's you see who is viewing your page. If they are another xanga user it'll give you their username (thus a link to their blog) and if they're not it gives the geographic location. I was once perplexed to discover I had an avid reader in Thailand who looked at my page multiple times per day. Then I realized that one of my good friends was on exchange over there, so that mystery was solved. It also tells you how they reached your site (whether via google, or some kind of xanga blogring - UWO or "Buffy fans", for example - which is kind of funny to see. Anyways.