Ten reasons why blogging every day is a BAD thing
Matt Brown
Thursday, 11 October 2007 19:14 UTC
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2006/06/w_why_blog_post_frequency_does.html
Anyone care to disagree?
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Thank you for sharing this article – a very interesting discussion and there is not much to add to what was said in the posts and the comments.
There are some blogs where the person writing has lots of ideas and I am really glad that the person posts every day. This is because while most of the posts are “objectively interesting” only a small proportion are “of interest to me”. If I check these once a month for entertainment value (I don’t have a tv remember!) or to “find something new to think about”, I can be pretty certain that there will be something that will amuse or interest me.
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The URL in your question isn’t live, Matt — here it is again, clickable:http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2006/06/w_why_blog_post_frequency_does.html
I agree that posting every day is not necessary if your readers use RSS, because they’ll automatically see if you have updated your blog when they check their reader.
However, some people don’t read blogs this way and so they may well miss your posts if you don’t write that often, as they will get bored with coming back to check your blog, if they find more often than not that you haven’t updated it.I agree with many of the reasons he gives for whether or not a blog is “good”, but I don’t think the frequency of posting is relevant to all of those reasons.
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Maxine’s point about not using RSS is a good one. In addition, as Bronwen points out, not all posts are targeted at the same audience. The quality of a blog does not have too much to do with frequency (Jeff Jonas, one of my favorite bloggers only blogs every now and then), but it definitely has an impact on traffic.
In my experience as someone who’s been doing this for a while, what matters most (other than content of course) is regularity. You can’t disappear for a while. If you post 3 times a week that’s fine, but if you stop for 2 weeks then search engines, and other more serendipitous forms of discovery will get impacted. There are blogs that I have removed from my feed reader since they get updated once or twice a month. If for no other reason than they get buried in all the feeds I subscribe to.
Last, but not the least, if you run any sort of advertising on your blog, you have to post at least 5-6 times a week, otherwise it’s pointless to monetize.
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There are many reasons why people blog (new verb: I blog, thou bloggest… havest thou blogged today?). But I respond mosts to Eric Kintz’s sage mantra “As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.”
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In the Nature Network, the situation is probably slightly different from that where you are blogging “independently”. In the independent blog it is the author’s responsibility to keep the party going — adding new topics of conversation and so on. But the Nature Network is a community. Topics written by every blogger are added to the list on the “Global Blog” page so there is probably a strong argument for blogging less frequently and instead writing ideas as comments on other peoples’ recent, similar posts. It might, for example, have been a bit nicer if all of the ideas relating to the James Watson affair had been written as comments on the first blog entry on the subject.
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Bronwen –
As one of the more prolific NN bloggers, I’m not sure I agree. For me the appeal of blogging (which I admit I’m very new to) is that it’s an opportunity to just zap something out when the thought occurs to me – if that happens to be three times in one day, then so be it.It’s fine to add comments to others’ blogs if (like this) it’s purely a case of reponding to what is in them, but I think it’s quite different if you read something in a blog that inspires a different train of thought – it probably is better then in your own blog (with a link to the original).
I also think it would seriously decrease creativity if every time an idea pops up that you want to share with the world, you had to check the global blogs list to see if someone else has already mentioned it. I think the big difference between blogging and most forms of publishing is spontaneity. The downside of this approach is duplication/lack of nice structure (though the technology should be able to impose that), but I think it’s a price worth paying.
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Hi Brian,
I actually agree with all of the points that you have made and enjoy the diversity of topics in your blog.
My comment was related to an observation that in the Nature Network, at present, the population of bloggers and commenters is actually quite small. I have not done the sum, but my thumb-suck estimate is that most of the discussion is coming from about 20 people. So if, heaven forbid, 5 bloggers opened conversations on very similar topics in the space of a few days, then that could be quite a serious dilution of the discussion.
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There is also much discussion of the same topics (and other science topics) elsewhere. To take your Jim Watson example, there have been intense discussions of that story on various Nature and NPG blogs (The Great Beyond, Action Potential and others), and of course in the blogosphere as a whole.
My experience of blog discussions in general are that they carry on in a free-ranging way, and it would be hard to have a central control and focus as you are suggesting. I also think that as Nature Network grows, as it is doing, it will be harder to achieve what you suggest.I think the way to keep on top of a particular debate in the blogosphere/Internet that interests one is to use a service like Postgenomic or Scintilla
- where you can use a keyword to see all posts everywhere on that topic (so long as the blog is registered, which is a simple procedure). I am not sure what happens to comments, though. I have previously been interested in services like Co-comment that try to capture all comments on blog posts and deliver those to you, so you can track conversations. I am not sure how they are getting on- there were a lot of teething problems when I looked into this a year or so ago. Many blogs allow email or rss updates for comments on individual posts, but what is needed is something more universal, so that conversations can be tracked as well as the posts. This might happen in Postgenomic, I am not sure. -
I don’t think that I am suggesting a central control. I was merely suggesting, at least for myself to be aware of what else is being discussed on the Network.
Perhaps my viewpoint is biased by the fact that I only ever access the Nature Network blogs via the Global Blogs page. What is perhaps unusual about this page is that the latest entries and comments of all bloggers and commenters are present. They are not just the latest entries and comments for an individual blog.
While we each have our own blog it does, for me at least, have more of the feeling of being a community and there is less of a pressure for each individual to open new discussions.
I wonder if this was intentional?
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That’s actually one reason why I don’t like blogs on NN. It sort of defeats the structure of blogging, at least as how I see it (since it’s not a true blog network).
I am also in the school that comments should be very specific and general thoughts, extension on a particular topic should be done via a blog entry, with appropriate use of trackbacks. Then you can use postgenomic and scintilla to track those clusters. Techmeme does a great job in the tech space.
In other words, a good trackback system combined with blog aggregation is the most efficient and useful way to capture blog conversations
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