Tree Surfing

How often should one update their blog. Once a day seems to be the optimal level for a more personal blog such as mine. If I don’t post enough then obviously I won’t maintain any decent readership level. Theoretically if I posted too often then my readers would find themselves overwhelmed by too much information.

I never seem to be able to keep up such a steady stream of posts for very long. This is due partly to to my only super power: Fear for me I am Procrastination Man!
Other reasons (excuses) include having a young baby and a pregnant wife. However, these excuses only hold true for one or two days, any longer and you can assume that lack of updates is not due to lack of time, but lack of motivation or willpower.

Community blogs, those with multiple authors, and the great “link-collector” sites such as Boing Boing have a much higher frequency of posts, often numbering 10, 15 or more posts per day. Their readers can tolerate a higher number of posts because they skim to find information that is relevant to them.

I like to rationalize my lack of daily posts away with some sometimes true, although often slightly over-used logic. Quality vs. Quantity. I don’t pretend that all of my posts are great works of art, but I generally won’t post willy-nilly about every thought that crosses my mind. Nothing like a constant spew of navel-gazing, or “what I ate today” posts to drive your readers away.

There is a fine line to walk between writing with sincerity and writing more than your readers really care about. Your readers can help keep you in check by posting comments and questions. Thanks again to all those who have been commenting on my past posts. The feedback is greatly appreciated.

Many of my friends are new to the blogging scene, and therefore I’ve decided I should post a little information to help them delve deeper into the internet world. Today we’ll talk about streamlining your blog reading process.

Survey: 11% of blog readers use RSS, 66% of people don’t know what RSS is.

Rather than bore you with a technical discussion of RSS and Atom Feeds you can use one of the best internet resources, the Wikipedia! Here is the RSS entry.

Suffice it to say that RSS feeds allow you to direct content from several sources into one easy to read location. Using an RSS feed reader you can download the feeds from all of your favorite blogs or websites right to your desktop. This eliminates the need to surf to each individual blog or website to check and see if they are updated. Open up your reader and poof all of the blogs with new posts appear instantaneously(or a little slower if you’re cursed with dial-up).

Personally I use Omea Reader, a wonderful (and FREE!) news aggregator. You can find an extensive list of readers here.

As a bonus for Firefox users, after installing Omea Reader,you can download an extension that lets you subscribe to the rss feed without entering them into Omea. (Although I can’t for the life of me find the link too it… anyone know of it?) I heart internet technology!

I saw a recent survey that only 6% of Americans READ blogs. Of course this is a little questionable, but I think that it’s at least somewhat reliable. Perhaps many of your friends have blogs, maybe a lot of your family members do… It MUST be more than 6% right?

I’ll see maybe 100 people, for more than 30 seconds in the average day: I live in a medium sized Midwestern town. If I take a walk down the street or go to a store and really start looking at people who will I see? 100 bloggers…10 bloggers… even one blogger? I work a blue collar job, the dull menial warehouse labor kind, I’d be surprised if there were more than one or two bloggers out of the several hundred people employed there. The self-published author who works with me had never even HEARD of blogs until I told him, and he didn’t seem that interested.

It’s mind boggling: The notion that the world at large is even bigger and less connected than you originally thought. When I started blogging I was amazed at how many nice, interesting, and like-minded people I was able to connect with. I was sure that blogging was the wave of the future, and soon the entire world would be woven into an intricate fabric of internet communication. This may one day be true, but not today, and not tomorrow.

Those of us who are writers and bloggers often forget the recent trend of abandoning books as entertainment; of not learning or using proper grammar and writing skills; of lower and lower test scores in schools. It’s easy it get excited and optimistic while encased in the protective bubble of the blog sphere.

We should be optimistic, but we can’t forget that the bulk of the world does not blog, does not read regularly, and does not care about our interests or goals. This is important for the young blogging communities such as the Writers Blog Alliance, to remember. The potential is huge, but the market is smaller than you imagine it to be. You aren’t selling yourselves to the world, you’re selling yourselves to other bloggers: To other bloggers who share the same interests. It’s not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind.

Now that your blogging bubble has popped how can you go on living?
Realize that the number of blogs continues to grow, especially among the younger generations.
Get more of your friends and family to start blogging.
Keep blogging yourself, remember to focus on friendly, quality posts.
Continue to read, comment, and link to the blogs of others, the more we interwoven we become the stronger blogging becomes. Links are power in the blog sphere.

Some more blogging Information for you Consideration:
The Blogging Iceberg
The Blogging Geyser