I thought of this idea yesterday, when a classmate and fellow blogger told me “you haven’t updated for a while”, to which I replied “who cares?”, and it got me thinking, does it really matter how often you blog?
I’m a firm believer in quality over quantity and frequency. Why blog just for the sake of it? Are people really going to just switch off if you fail to post for 24 hours? Maybe a few.
I think that most ’serious’ blog readers are now using RSS or Google Reader to aggregate their blogs. So an inactive blog often goes un-noticed among the long list – it does for me anyway - and I don’t go through very often to clean out the completely inactive blogs. It’s not like I have nothing else to read (in fact I have too much).
One thing which I find is that if someone posts too much I just switch right off. I probably won’t even read the titles. I just mark all as read. It’s blog overload. When you switch on your Reader and there is a swarm of a hundred or more posts, chances are I will only read a handful, those with the most interesting and eye catching titles, or posts which look to be quick reads.
I think that people put a lot of stock in their hit counts. It’s a source of pride for people. I admit that at school we compare hits with each other, it kind of spurs us on. “Whoa, he got 50 hits yesterday! I better write something really awesome tonight!”.
Since I started this blog the hits have been reasonably consistent. I put this down to proper tagging, and the posts generate search engine hits even when my blog is dormant for long periods. Plus, they help people. I like that. I write tutorials on how to do things I wish I knew when I started out in journalism.
So what is the point of spamming out a ridiculous amount of posts every day? Are people really reading them? Or are you just being ‘marked as read’?
I blog when I have something good to blog about, not just because I feel that I should.
Thoughts?
3 Comments
October 8, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Blogging Frequency: No it doesn’t matter as long as you have a captive audience who is going to keep going back to your blog even if you havent updated in the past couple of days!
Is it just me that think its hilarious that the day you post a blog about blogging frequency, you update your blog twice!
Keep up the good work Luke!
P.S check out: kristinakeogh.wordpress.com
October 8, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Fair call Luke, not much is more pretentious than a blogger *cough* David Farrah *cough* overdoing it with 3000 posts in a single day (seriously, so far today: 11 posts!) I must say, however, I’m pretty keen to see some more of your Electoonz !
Ciao
October 7, 2008 at 3:32 pm
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