Blog timeliness (for Terry Teachout)

Back when Slate first launched, its editor, Michael Kinsley, fresh from the New Republic, was still in magazine-metaphor mode. Do you remember his welcome note?

We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to "flip through" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents.
SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays.

Well, the page numbers didn't last long, and neither did the conceit that Slate was "basically a weekly". Without a printing schedule or the US Postal Service to worry about, such things largely cease to have any importance. But still, when bloggers migrate to the web from print media, they often like the idea of a publishing schedule, and get a bit agitated when it goes out of kilter. One of the best new bloggers is the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout, who worried on Tuesday that

For the rest of the week, I'll be posting entries not in my usual exqusitely well-organized magazine-type style (i.e., five or six items posted shortly after midnight), but whenever I can grab a few spare minutes to write and publish something on the fly.

Today, however, he started thinking that even though people read their WSJ first thing in the morning, they might not necessarily want all of Terry Teachout's material then as well:

I'd be interested in knowing whether you prefer the old magazine-style package of early-morning posts or are equally happy with intermittent postings throughout the day, so long as they add up to a daily diet of comparable caloric value. Your thoughts?

Well, my thoughts, Terry, are that the whole point of blogging is to put up material as and when you write it. felixsalmon.com, for instance, is not a "weekly": if you came here today and tried to read everything from the past week, that would come to more than 7,600 words of material – which is way more than anybody wants to read on one website at one time. On the other hand, it's not a "daily": most days it's not updated at all. What I do have is an RSS feed which lets people know when the site's been updated, and which solves all the problems. I get to publish irregularly without worrying that I'm disappointing return visitors who will find nothing new, and my readers get all my content when it is hot off the presses.

Now, that said, RSS is a very young technology, and most people have yet to adopt it. So while weblogs should all have an RSS feed (yes, even yours), it's probably reasonable to go on the assumption that most of your visitors are simply people who have bookmarked your site or followed a link to it.

I can definitely see that the diurnal cycle is a natural one, and that some people might well have a list of weblogs that they check every day. But for these people, it doesn't matter when you post your material: when they come at a certain time of the day, they'll see the last 24 hours' content, read it, and move on.

There is one blogger in particular that I can think of who used to regularly post exactly one piece every day. (Recently, that schedule has changed, because he's been on the road; who knows whether or not he'll return to it.) He might well want to try to post at roughly the same time every day, because his pieces are often very topical, and because he would want a daily visitor to always see something new. But neither of those considerations really apply to you. In fact, posting in a clump just after midnight makes your postings less topical, not more so: you have to save them up in order to post them at a later hour.

I also note that you are quite keen to increase the number of visitors to your site. Well, I can tell you that if someone knows for sure that there won't be any new content, there's no chance they're going to go back a second time. An irregularly-updated weblog, on the other hand, will often have much higher visitor numbers, because people check back when they have a spare minute to see if anything new has appeared. (And a lot of us have a lot of spare minutes, I can tell you: I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the vast majority of blog surfing is conducted by bored office workers.)

What's more, one of the greatest things about blogs in general is that they're much more personal than, say, the Wall Street Journal. Updating a website shortly after midnight every day is not personal: it's mechanical. It also mitigates against the kind of impulsive postings which might not go down in internet history but which help to build community: the things which give your audience an idea of who you are and what makes you tick. "Ohmigod I just heard George Plimpton died," maybe followed by a personal anecdote, is not exactly newspaper material, but it's perfect for a weblog. I put something up on MemeFirst the minute I heard Edward Said died, for instance, which certainly helps to identify the kind of things that the site is interested in.

But it's not just newsy stuff which I'm talking about here. Just a week ago, Virginia Postrel used up her devoted readers' precious bandwidth with a posting asking "Why are the trash cans in hotel rooms so small?". And her devoted readers loved her for it, just like Andrew Sullivan's readers like it when he talks about that bloody beagle of his. That kind of thing – in moderation, of course – helps build a following, but our own self-censorship mechanisms start to kick in if we try to save something like that for posting after midnight. It might be what we're thinking at the time, but it certainly doesn't look, on second reading, like something worth publishing for posterity.

So the upsides to publishing on an as-and-when basis are many: your site stats increase, your readers become more loyal (if only because they visit you more often), your blog becomes more blog-like and less like a daily newspaper column, and it also, when it wants or needs to, becomes more timely. What are the downsides? For you, I'd say the main one would be that blogging would become more of a full-time occupation. At the moment, you might be doing your regular job during the day and then settling down in the evenings to do the blog, maybe after having mulled a number of different possible topics in the back of your head over the course of the day. If you change posting habits then you might find yourself blogging during hours of the day in which you had intended to do something else.

That said, no-one's going to mind if you don't update between the hours of nine and five, or if you do so only very occasionally. Do what works best for you, because that, I can guarantee you, is going to be what works best for your readers. I would only urge you not to sit on blog postings for hours after you've written them, just because you want to wait until a certain hour before you post. I simply cannot see why that does either you or your readers any favours at all.

Posted by Felix at 22:47 EST