I look back at the appallingly low number of postings here lately and all I can think is, Ugh. But marketing guru Eric Kintz suggests that maybe I’ve been ugh-ing needlessly. Maybe it’s not so bad if I’m not posting daily, as I’d like to be:
"Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging....Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?
Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.
Oh, but when you read his 10 reasons, a whole bunch of them turn out to be variations on “You shouldn’t post stuff just for the sake of posting, cuz it’ll be crap.” Unfortunately, I’ve got lots of really deep and meaningful things to say -- I just don’t have time to say them. If only I could be one of Nancy Kress’s Sleepless, I’d get so much more done...
Then again, blogging can get you into trouble with stuffed-shirt Luddites who don’t understand the love that comes from high Technorati rankings and discovering that one of your posts has garnered like 20 comments, as British chick Catherine learned when she got fired from her corporate administrative job after her stuffed-shirt Luddite employers discovered she’d been blogging, if totally anonymously, about her life, at petite anglaise. (Catherine lives in Paris.) Telegraph.co.uk has the shocking details of her postings:
References to work have included descriptions of a quintessentially English office atmosphere with a framed portrait of the Queen on the wall and "Cadbury's chocolate, Tetley tea, beers after work".There is one embellished account of accidentally showing her cleavage while helping to set up a video conference meeting. And she refers to an office Christmas party where someone breaks the "unwritten rule" of pulling his cracker before the senior partner and his wife have pulled theirs.
This has been construed, by her employers, as being “damaging” to the company. Or perhaps just to that premature-cracker-puller. Anyway, Catherine is suing her former employer, and will probably end up with a movie deal for her trouble, too. And her blog is doing gangbusters traffic now. Welcome to Web 2.3, corporate-overlord stuffed-shirt-Luddite suckers.
These folks -- the likes of Catherine’s corporate overlords, I mean -- just need to get with the Web 2.5 program (or Web 2.7, or whatever version we’re in today; how will we know we’ve moved to Web 3.0?). Privacy is one of the “prices of virtual living,” according to CNN -- as everyone knows, gossip was virtually unheard of before 1997, and there was no way to disseminate the written word prior to the advent of the Web. And fortunately we have guys like Larry Rosen, who thoughtfully replicates that 1997 mindset for us, and not just with the title of his book TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play, which harkens back to that heady time when the @ symbol was still a cool way to represent the word “at.” CNN quotes him as saying:
We now live in an era where the technology is becoming mandatory instead of a choice.
After all, no one ever required us individual humans to harness fire or adopt the longbow or get vaccinated against smallpox -- it’s always been our choice to let our Forest Tribe freeze to death during a cold snap while River Tribe stayed toasty warm, our choice to see our bowmen shot through the heart while the enemy stayed nicely out of range of their shortbows, our choice to let our children die while others lived. But today iPod earbuds are grafted to the lobes of newborns mere hours out of the womb, and jail sentences for not carrying your cell phone on your person at all times -- not to mention those for not even owning a cell phone at all -- can be ten years and longer.
But now I’m confused: are daily blog postings mandatory, or not? I love blogging -- though I can quit at anytime I choose, it’s not like I have a problem with it or anything, not like I’m addicted, c’mon, that’s ridiculous -- and I want to make sure I’m doing it right.
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