Nature Network Bloggers forum: topic
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What's the Frequency?
Anna Kushnir
Tuesday, 17 June 2008 18:38 UTC
When I was just a fledgling blogger three or so years ago, I asked Bora, a super-blogger and overall wonderful resource, for a few secrets to running a successful blog. His answer was simple – frequency. He said that one has to post daily, or at least a few times a week in order to keep readers coming back, thereby keeping the traffic high.
This makes perfect sense and I know that it is true, but it doesn’t sit well with me. I would rather write an insightful (or as insightful as I am capable of) post once a week or week and a half, rather than put up short posts that don’t say much either about me or the subject they are presenting. What are the NNBloggers thoughts on this?
As a blog reader, do you prefer frequent, short blog posts, or more in-depth but rarer posts?
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Replies
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I don’t agree with the frequency point, but then I read blogs in RSS so it does not matter to me. If I had to keep checking back to a blog to see if it had been updated, then yes, I’d be annoyed if it didn’t update regularly and would probably stop visiting.
To me, as a regular blog reader, I find short posts are better, because part of the interest in blog reading is the discussion. Blog comments tend to stray off-point, and so a shorter post tends on average to have more chance of the discussion remaining vaguely relevant and even possibly interesting and stimulating.
In-depth posts are interesting to read, but I don’t think the quality of comments on these posts is very high, on average. In my experience of blog writing and reading, a short relatively trivial post gets more comments than a longer, thoughtful one.
There has been quite a bit of debate about this topic on NN already (inevitably!), including some experiments with the post/comment genre eg by Richard Grant, Bob O’Hara and Henry Gee, on their blogs.
To my mind, the main feature that attracts me to read a blog regularly is the personality of the blogger. The blogs I like best out of the many I have or do subscribe to, are the ones where I feel I “know” the blogger and so I look forward to reading that person’s take on whatever— their specialist blog’s topics, life in general, etc. Again, from this point of view, frequency is not important.
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Point well taken, Maxine. I guess it’s neither the frequency nor the length of the posts, but the poster him/herself that’s important. That’s something that I noticed myself – if I like the blogger’s voice, I will keep coming back, sometimes even if the content is not strictly within my field of interest.
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I do think that frequency is important, but this could be daily as well as weekly. Most bloggers just wouldn’t have the time for daily blog posts. And what is a successful blog? Many comments, many links to your blog, fan email?
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Yup, regularity is more important than frequency. And quality and voice are more important still.
Also, the things are changing over time – frequency was very important in the early years, when almost nobody used RSS. It is less important now (though Technorati still notes significantly higher rankings of frequently-updated blogs, but not as much as before).
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