Blog tempo
Blog tempo, for lack of a better phrase, is something that fascinates me. There’s this intriguing interplay between how often a blog is updated and what kind of content it has.
First, there’s the forgotten blogs. Obviously, someone started one on a lark and then just forgot about it. The content is generally very personal, and very bad. There are also the crappy blogs that are updated rarely up through somewhat frequently, but I’ll exclude those as well in these considerations.
Beyond that there are two major categories. There are infrequently updated blogs and frequently updated blogs. I’ll draw a dividing line at multiple posts per day: if the author is, on average, writing more than one post per day, I’ll call that frequently updated.
Infrequently updated blogs tend to have posts that read that essays or newspaper columns. The author is clearly putting a lot of thought into the posts, possibly sitting on the posts for days, revising them as necessary, trying to make it perfect before it’s published to the web. These authors will frequently go days at a time in between posts, sometimes as often as weeks. To the casual observer it looks like these blogs are at risk of being dropped due to inactivity at any time, but the author actually has some long-term goals. They write posts as ideas come to them, not before. If they don’t think of a good thing to write about, they simply won’t write, until a good idea strikes. They feel no compulsion to write on their blog just for the sake of constantly providing new content (albeit bad content) for their readers.
Frequently updated blogs have a much different character to them. They have a running dialog with their readers. The posts are shorter, more informal, and usually more personal (unless it is a strict subject blog). These reveal the real essence of what a “blog” is. Infrequently updated blogs are more like the writing of people who want to be columnists but aren’t working for a newspaper. Frequently updated blogs are something different, something that really didn’t exist before the advent of the web and blogging. The closest analog would be diaries that children are wont to keep, but those lack the mass-distribution methods.
So what kind of a blog am I trying to write? I don’t know. I figure I fall somewhere in between. I already am a columnist for my school’s newspaper, so I kind of have that angle covered, but I also do run across ideas that aren’t really suitable for a column for my school’s paper that I would like to write about anyway. That’s what some of these blog entries are about. Other than those, however, I will admit that I am somewhat fascinated by the blogging phenomenon in general, and I am trying to emulate that somewhat. I do feel these weird compulsions to update this blog every day, and I have to fight the urge to publish something that simply isn’t good because I couldn’t think of a good idea.
Surely I’m in no position to give advice to the aspiring blogger, but I’ll try it just the same. Notepads, both electronic and physical, are your friend. Carry paper and a pen whenever you’re going to be away from your computer for awhile. A good idea may strike, but by the time you get back to a computer, you may have forgotten it already. And when good ideas do strike when you’re at your computer, just open up Notepad, write them in, and save them. I have some text files containing dozens of ideas I can always peruse through, mining for the very best ideas as I need them.
