After wondering how I should be doing links I am now brainstorming on what is the optimal pace of publication on a blog. Here are observations after 5 years of reading blogs:

With RSS, dilettante bloggers are not penalized anymore
It does not bother me that John Udell or Euan Semple only post once in a while as I am warned by my RSS reader every time they publish. I don’t end up going to their site just to find that nothing has changed since my last visit.

You read 5 posts, you scan 20
When my reader announces more than a certain number of elements I have some internal alarm going on. I have a certain time I can dedicate to reading blogs, and if I fear a particuar site is going to take me over my limit I enter scan mode. Scan mode is very different from read mode. You check the headers, rarely go into the post itself. A very thin part of the information actually gets to you. I could not tell you where exactly that limit is, but it is probably around 7 or 8 posts a day from the same person.

Breaks are no problem
I don’t mind bloggers that stop writing for a while. Actually I sometimes enjoy a break as most of my readings are work related. If Robert Scoble could take more vacations I wouldn’t mind because I would feel less guilt when, coming back from four days off work, I discard the certainly interesting 80+ posts he wrote during that time span. Maybe Bill G. can help on this.

One 10 lines post is better than five 2 lines posts
On a blog every post is a different story, so when you switch from one to another you have to do some “mental rebooting” (that would do a nice conference name for sure). You get out of the previous story and into the next one. This particular task is indeed an effort for readers, so grouping your says as much as you can is a good thing. Interestingly journalists that blog seem to do that better than anyone else, as you can see with Emmanuelle or Paul Mason.

After considering all this I think that the perfect rhythm is probably around 1-3 posts par days, 5 days a week. So people can follow you, read all your posts, and don’t come monday morning at the office with 30 posts to catch up with. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 at 10:34 am and is filed under blog, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.