PERSONAL JOURNALS: ARE THEY BLOGS ?

PERSONAL JOURNALS: ARE THEY BLOGS ?

Personal journals are the most easygoing sort of blog. More ambitious are topical blogs in which the link-and-comment style takes its pacing cues from daily news. If your topic is Loch Ness monster sightings, you might not have much to say on a daily basis. But hordes of technology blogs, political blogs, current events blogs, and many other newsy blogs compete with each other to stay up to date. Forget up to date; they compete to stay up to the minute. That’s where the pressure comes in: covering all the news and covering it without much lag.

Another reason to be speedy with a topical blog goes beyond sheer competitiveness. Several blogs chattering about the same subject, with comments and links flying back and forth, form a big, multisite conversation on the topic.

The quest for readership, like the quest for topical currency, differs from one type of blog to another. Here again, personal diaries often don’t have readership ambitions equal to topical blogs. If you are writing for close friends and family, you can rely on your audience to check your space from time to time and delight in the occasional new entry. But if you’re writing for a broader readership of strangers who also follow other blogs in the same subject area, leaving holes in your posting schedule might cause your blog to drop off your audience’s radar. Devoted blog readers like frequently updated content. As a general rule, if more than one weekday passes with no new entries, the blog risks losing momentum. If that seems harsh or exaggerated, you might be underestimating the voracious content appetite of blog addicts. Fortunately, some exceptions apply: Most bloggers dial back on the weekends, which are exempt from the news cycle. Conversely, casual personal interest bloggers might swing into high gear on the weekends after slacking during the week.

Respected blogs have more leeway; their readers are willing to wait for posts because the content is worthwhile and influential. Customs be blasted, you can do whatever you want. Volume equals traffic. To understand the fickle nature of blog readers, you must understand their information-soaked lifestyle. The most active blogosphere participant.
They use newsreaders that merge their feeds into one big feed that, when refreshed, shows the most recent posts from all the feeds. The first option is the most prevalent. Even though feeds are becoming more popular, and I believe they will eventually be used by nearly everyone who reads online, most people at the time of this writing have no idea what they are.