A Clarification on the Nature of Blogging

After reading my 2009 goals, George pointed out that a blog post a day is unreasonable. I agree for a few reasons. First, how in the world could I come up with enough to write? No one likes junk blog posts, the ones that people put up just for the sake of filling a day on their blogging schedule. Once you start posting like that, people start ignoring your blog in their feed reader, no matter how interesting they think you are. I do not intent for my blog to go this way. Second, a good blog post takes longer than 15 minutes to write. Many of my favorite posts took about one and a half hours to write. Obviously I had more free time back then.

So here's a clarification: when I say 15 minutes of writing on my blog, this doesn't necessarily mean I will finish a post each day. Just because blogging can be instant publication doesn't mean it should always be. Writing something good takes time, but you don't always have all the time at once. So I'm turning my blogging back into a revision-necessary form of writing. Blogging has always been a balance between quality and quantity: if you have a life outside of the web, you have a limited amount of resources to distribute between the two. Your blog with either be infrequent but meaningful, or full of daily, maybe hourly, posts linking to videos or commenting on the weather. Since I view my blog as a place to cull material for future essays, the former is more helpful to me.

Take a look at this post: that is what 15 minutes of blogging looks like. Barely enough time for one coherent thought!