Shut up, he explained

I got this link from reinventing college media, a website that holds my hand as I shiver in the sleet of the brave new multimedia world. The essay linked to is all about how the smart modern blogger does not try to post every day in an effort to draw readers into your poppy field and make them lie down and be with your forever. Turns out that posting too often -- since more and more of your sophisticated blog readers are relying on an RSS feed that gives them a heads up when you post -- can hurt readership for two reasons, one slightly less obvious than the other.

1) Obvious reason. When your philosophy of writing is wall pelting -- keep tossing and maybe something will stick -- naturally you will lose readers. It's not like being a newspaper columnist where adequacy once or twice a week is enough. (Ruthless natural selection in blogworld. So much for false claims of Intelligent Design.)

2) Even if your daily posting is pretty good but not quite splendid, a reader who might otherwise stick with you might drop you because that RSS feed keeps pulling him/her back in. Occasionally it's worth the trip. But every day? Don't think so. A similar thing true of those without RSS feeds who drop by once in a while only in that case the problem is backlog: maybe it's going to be good but too much to wade through.

Now that I think about it, these concepts have certainly affected my consumption of one regrettably obscure blog and one pretty well known one. Brother Bob Wieder does not post often, but he is always funny -- consistent lows of seven, highs of nine on the Richter -- so I read everything he writes, infrequent though that is, and try to comment often to keep him in the game.

Link to him over there on the left lane of this blog through the link Laughing with Oboglo.

But I have thrice subscribed to the Huffington Report and thrice dropped it. The content is almost always liberal-minded and thus of the kind I should like. But there's just too much of it, and I find it repetitive and not all that wonderful when consumed in mass quantities. I am just too busy to do my own gatekeeping.

So I'll just shut the fuck up for the rest of today and certainly tomorrow and probably Tuesday, which looks pretty busy and the rest of the week who knows I don't have a crystal ball.

Already I see the smiles of relief.