Thanks to Dennis Fox, who links to it to assuage his defensiveness at irregular posting, for pointing to this piece by a marketing professor.
Since the Nov.15, 1999 origin of Follow Me Here (2423 days ago), I have posted 14,438 posts (including this one). The argument that prolific isn’t necessarily good certainly applies to FmH. But, as you have no doubt noticed, the frequency of posts has indeed fallen off here recently. Posting less frequently here is done without much anguish at all; I am way past the article’s touted pressure to post daily to establish one’s seriousness (FmH speaks for itself).
I agree, traffic is not generated by daily posting and it is irrelevant to FmH’s ‘success’, such as it is. Whether a significant decrement in post frequency would affect the loyalty of those who frequent FmH remains to be seen, even if you continue to surf over here and check for new posts in a ‘Web 1.0’ way rather than subscribe to my RSS feed á la Web 2.0. I get several hundred hits a day; I have only several dozen RSS subscribers. Certainly, if the posts slow down too much, beyond a certain point loyal readers would find it unproductive to keep surfing over here, but I hope I am still far from that level.
Frequent posting may drive poor content quality and negatively affect the credibility of the ‘blogosphere’, the author says, but I have never posted to meet a quota; I post if I have something to say or if I have something to which I think you would be interested in being pointed. While much weblogging has evolved into either diary, confessional, or pretentious punditry, I have always said that I come from the original late ’90’s weblogging tradition (Rebecca Blood ) in which what you post is — literally — a log of your interesting surfing. If I surf the net, which is an integral part of my self-informing, I hit a few keys and log what grabs me, albeit finding my own voice in the process.
So, then, if there has not been any sudden liberation from the compulsion to post daily, why am I posting less?
- First of all, I am in a busier phase in my career and my community involvements than I was when I started this.
- Secondly, I am sleeping better these days; by comparison, go back and look at the timestamps of my posts during more prolific periods here. It has become far more important to be far less sleep-deprived, and I love my family too much to choose this over them if I cannot have my cake and eat it.
- Third, I have an incredible degree of Bush fatigue; it is not that I cannot get outraged anymore, but there is only a finite roster of ways in which a government can lie, cheat, steal, kill, destroy, and oppress. Bush and his minions have long since done them all; I have long since taken note of them here; nothing surprises me, and my outrage is constant and numbing.
- And I have only a limited tolerance for my own frustration and despondency that a more effective movement of opposition has not arisen in response to his outrages. And I have no confidence that weblogs like FmH are change agents. (I don’t know what would be effective activism these days, I guess, but I can no longer rationalize as I did for so long that FmH was an integral form of activist activity)
- It also seems that the polarization of the blogosphere, like that of the country, has been proceeding apace. I don’t think I have readers with whom I don’t agree on the large issues and I don’t believe dialogue across the culture war in modern America is productive. So my conversation with my readers is or should be more nuanced and subtle; the opportunity for that inherently arises less often than for bolder pronouncements, or maybe it is just my taking the opportunity less often.
- And, yes, the ‘landfill’ of useless blowhard weblogs proliferates, but so too are there more of those who do have something thoughtful to say, or something interesting to link to. They’ve gotten there first and said it better, whatever ‘it’ is.
- Also, I think, the non-blog web is more homogeneous and, well, less interesting, than it was when the original webloggers emerged in the late ’90’s. There may be less cataloguing of interesting sites going on today because there may be less interesting sites, or at least I am finding them less. The quirky early web users have moved on. The web is so much less a place to be quirky and original for the novelty of it. Certainly, in numbers, there are diverse numbers of independent sites around, but many of them are rubbish. So the links to the New York Times, Wired, Salon and the like take over…
- And finally, I do want to be responsive to what I imagine my readers want. Over the years, I have noticed which posts generate comments and discussion. That is a rough indicator, since each individual post doesn’t have a click-through or a hit counter, of what grabs you. And it is not the simple linking posts, but the ones in which I make a comment — insightful, pseudo-insightful, absurd, outrageous, provocative, hackneyed, trite or limited. I am not saying I will be able to do more of that, but it certainly means I will do less of the other.
Comments?
