Thursday, July 21, 2011

It's Just Me Here

In blogging, audience is all about frequency of posting. The more often you put up posts, the more often people come to your site to read those posts. Writing posts is pretty hard work, though, so you either have to not particularly care about large traffic (which is the route I take) or you have to work your proverbial ass off.

Or you add writers to your blog, preferably a whole bunch of writers.

To me that rather spoils the whole point of having a blog. I read blogs to enjoy a personal viewpoint on the political world. I don’t always agree with that viewpoint, and in fact I seek out blogs with views that differ from mine. In reading blogs I am getting to know the person who writes the blog, as well as pursuing a political interest.

When a blogger starts adding more writers, the thing becomes more of a newspaper than a blog. Certainly their number of “hits” increase, but any connection that I felt to the original blogger diminishes to a vanishing point.

Digby has now added another writer and, as is rather typical of these additions, he writes lengthy and highly opaque pieces designed more to impress than to communicate. I don’t read them. As soon as I see his byline I skip the piece and continue to those written by the person I came to the site to read.

So if frequency is your issue, well, you get what you get. I write when I see something that moves me to write. I never write merely for the sake of increasing the “post count” and I’m not inviting anyone to “join me” here. I am what you get.

2 comments:

  1. Agreed. It would be nice to not have to work hard and have traffic. I am lucky to get 20 hits a day and I don't really care all that much. Perhaps I could do a "rule five" thing and get a few more hits.

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  2. bruce9:18 AM

    I don't know how much traffic you get, and you do post daily, which I read, even if not commenting on it. Keep it up!

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