10 Days. 10 Posts.
10 days ago I joined a group of bloggers who agreed to post once a day for 10 days.
Here’s a timeline of my last 10 posts:
- Day 1 Media: Stop Scraping Bottom-of-the-Barrel Tweets
- Day 2 Kids and Online Porn: What You Can Do Right Now
- Day 3 The Revolution Will Be Live-Streamed: #istandwithwendy
- Day 4 Learning to Accept New Tech
- Day 5 Proving Damages to Get Damages: Liberty vs. Libel Online
- Day 6 Trolls: The True Privacy Killer
- Day 7 Goodbye, Google Reader. I Never Really Knew Ye
- Day 8 How to Practice Disruption
- Day 9 Psychology of Information Technology
- Day 10 (this post you are reading now: 10 Day #Back2Blog Challenge)
I learned a bunch of lessons from this. Here’s a very brief history of PurpleCar.net, so you can have some context for what I learned:
2004: PurpleCar Founded
2004-2007: Wrote Personal Essays
2007-Present: Wrote Niche Articles about the Internet and Psych of IT
Last 10 Days: 1st Time I’ve ever Posted 10 Days in a Row
Lessons Learned
- Crawlers. Benefits do exist for bloggers who do post daily. For example, when you update your page more frequently, the search engine caches crawl your site more often, which in turn, experts think, gives you better ranking in search.
- Expertise. Blogging daily also gives Internetters the impression that you have something to say. Being termed a “blogger” in the online world really only comes from blogging once, twice, maybe 3 times daily. Some argue that the content a blogger offers is also important, i.e., quality tops quantity, but the jury is still out on that one.
- Efficiency. I’ve always placed myself solidly in the “quality” camp, letting my blog go for days or even weeks with no posts. I put off posting until I had time to write a solid article. My posts usually tend to be longer and require at least a little bit of research. One post can take hours. Most of them take at least an hour. I need to be quicker if I’m going to post daily. Quality may suffer.
- Making Choices. Posting daily means I either don’t have hours to spend on each entry or I don’t do any other work for the day. My other projects took a back seat this week as I worked to produce quality content for this 10-day stint.
One blogger I enjoy reading is Adam Tinworth, a content producer and online journalism dude. Adam posts interesting links with a small paragraph of response. Sometimes these small bits start large and valuable comment streams. I should take a cue from the master, obviously, and incorporate more plain curation into blog posts. I put curated links within the content but it’s possible that one curated link *is* content.
*Ding*
That’s the sound of me leveling up in blogging.
At the end of the day, I think it’s better to post more slightly interesting snippets than post less frequent deep analyses. That’s a whole new skillset for me: quick but interesting Internet bites. I’ll continue to use new apps like Scoop.it, Storify and perhaps Slideshare (what’s with all the S’s? And StumbleUpon for the hell of it), but I will definitely try to keep up with daily posting and see where it takes me.
What say you, Dear Reader? Any opinion on this, now that blogging has been around for an Internet eon?
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I find Facebook drains exactly 100% of my blogging urge for the day. I usually c/c G+. I know, I’m doing it all wrong…
That’s the danger, though. Why not blog first, then share to FB? At least you’d own your content that way.
ding achievement unlocked.
Why not do both? We try to mix up the quick and dirty with the pieces that have some actual thought involved. Mostly it’s the former, because thinking is hard and all. When there is something substantive to say, or we’re shamelessly trying to shake the money tree, it veers to the latter. But ordinarily, it’s a question of what do we want to say and do we have enough time today to say that. (Our lifetime average is something like 7 posts every 6 days on the old warhorse, plus the other sites/FB/Tweeters/tumblrs/etc.)
I can do both. But you’ve known me for almost 10 years now. I sure do like to have links and resources for everything I say. I’ve never wanted to be seen as someone who just spews opinions. I’ll try it, though. I think one post a day is enough.
you and your insistence on quality…