Verbosity breeds contempt

Writing this blog day after day has taught me a few things. One such discovery is that it’s really hard to come up with something to say every day, five days a week. Yet all the experts (the has-been-drips-under-pressure, as my father would point out) suggest that you can’t grow a following or increase your site visits if you’re not updating regulary, even daily.

Some weeks its not so hard. There seems to be a decent amount of material. Other weeks it’s a total famine. I’ve found that when the supply of topics grows short one of the easiest fall-backs is to complain about something. There’s seldom a lack of things to complain about, especially with the world population as high as it is. With over 7 billion people out there, there’s a good chance someone, somewhere is doing something to really torque my shorts. The least I can do is get some blog-fodder out of it, right?

But more and more lately I’m dissatisfied with that approach. Regardless of how amazingly flawless my arguments may be, I don’t usually come out of it any happier. I doubt I’ve changed any minds–perhaps not even encouraged anyone to consider a different viewpoint. And usually it hasn’t scratched my itch, either. If anything I’m probably more sensitive to the issue and anything related.

I’m trying to be less negative. Not only that, I’m trying to be more positive. But the Thumper Rule is the enemy of daily blog updates. I’m still trying to find the right balance. It may take time to adjust my mindset to seize more easily on positive topics while doing my best to ignore the negativity out there. Friends have suggested that I not worry so much about posting every day. I should probably listen to them. It’s not like daily posting has had that much impact on my popularity. The only impact I’ve found is negative–when I don’t write every day my page hits decrease. But as a general rule daily posting doesn’t have that marked a positve impact on page views. I may be slowly (over years) increasing, but it’s probably not enough to really worry about. Perhaps the best thing I can do to encourage long-term page view growth is to write more reviews.

Anyway, perhaps this is just my aimless, meandering way of warning you that I’m going to try to not force myself to post something when I have nothing good to post about. That may mean there won’t be a daily update at 10:00 am like usual.

I’m probably the only one who is at all bothered by that.