Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore

[Keyword: online journalism]. Here's a great and well-considered article by Eric Kintz on the need for bloggers to ignore the principle of frequent posting. More important in a world swamped with bloggers, is to write quality posts and get involved in the blogosphere. It's quite a wake-up call - although it should be remembered that many bloggers (myself included) use their blogs as diaries-cum-bookmarks: a place to store all those useful sites and articles they come across from day to day.

For citizen journalists, however, the following points he make are particularly worth considering:

"#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality – The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter. Some of the most insightful –and most quoted- marketing thought blogging leaders are actually infrequent posters, from Sam Decker to Charlene Li or Randi Baseler.

"#7: Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere – as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. The collective wisdom of user generated content was supposed to provide an alternative to biased traditional media content – it is instead echoing the thoughts and biases of a few.

"#8 - Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies – As they struggle with bandwidth constraints as well as peer pressure to join the blogosphere, more and more companies will resort to partnering with their PR agencies to create blogs. The blogosphere will in turn lose some of its effectiveness and value."