This afternoon, for reasons only my subconscious will ever understand, I went touring some of the old blog sites that I used to visit regularly before losing interest in them thanks to infrequent updates there. While Hell may or may not hold a special place for such blogs - pretending Hell even exists - I personally just shuffle them off into a bookmark folder that rarely gets opened. But today had "rarely" written all over it, and so open it, I did.
Most of the exiled blogs had either not been updated since last I checked in on them - many, many months ago - or had seen only a handful of posts over that time. Now, there's no golden rule for posting frequencies for blogs, and I know that. You want to start up a blog and post there once per lunar eclipse? No law against it! But that's a different style of blogging, I think, than what interests me as a reader. It's a little like reading a comic series where a new issue comes out about once a year... it has to be a really, really good title for me to care enough to keep reading! Same with blogs, as it turns out.
Having recently passed the 1500 blog post (and 18 month) mark, I think I've demonstrated a certain stick-with-it-ness that's more in line with what I look for in other blogs. The ones that I do visit daily usually deliver the goods, even if not every post is my own particular cup of tea. I know from personal experience that it's not easy to come up with something to write about each and every day, especially if you happen to also be holding down a full-time job (and maybe even writing a book, at the same time). But I also know that it's doable, if you really want to put the effort in.
All of which, of course, "don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," as Bogart put it so eloquently in Casablanca. It's just food for thought.
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5 comments:
Hence my vast preference for using a feed reader rather than bookmarks. It doesn't matter how often a blog I'm interested in is updated: when there's a new post it'll be delivered right to me. I'd be surprised if I've visited any of the sites in my bookmarks list more than once or twice in the last year---if I've gone to them at all!---but the infrequent posters whose blogs I'm subscribed to, including the "bursty" ones, get just as much attention when there's a new entry as the ones that are updated several times a day.
+1 for feed reader preference
bookmarks are soo web 1.0
Turning it around, though, from a blogger's perspective: saying that feed readers are the only way to go is like a business saying it'll only sell stuff online despite having customers who'd prefer to come visit their store. There are times when that makes sense, but most businesses would cater to both types of customer preferences.
In other words, my blog hopefully satisfies those who read it via feeds, and those who stop by in their favourite browser (in the Man from Mars' disparaging and condescending "web 1.0" terms). But I guess that's just a matter of style.
Hey, read what/however you'd like... just attempting to suggest you're conflating "interesting" with "frequently updated". Was Countdown more interesting than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because it was published every week instead of once every twelve? (On average: there were three monthly issues and then gaps of six, seven and three months between subsequent ones.)
You're actually making my point for me, Peter. If a blog's equivalent in quality to LOEG, then I wouldn't care how often it was updated. The reality is that most blogs - like most comic titles - are way, way less interesting than that. In that case, regularity and frequency actually count for something. Countdown, like 52 before it, at least came out every week, without delay. As such, both series at least accomplished something worthwhile and noteworthy. Blogs that are mildly interesting and updated four times a year aren't really worth my time, as far as I'm concerned.
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