The dominant trend in the blogosphere for a good while has been one of what I like to call ‘reactive’ blogging. It’s very common for a new story to appear on a major blog, which is picked up by other blogs which add nothing to the initial content. The result is your feed readers filling up with posts about the same thing. Most of the time, it is the same thing!

There are seriously very few blogs out there that actually generate their own content. Design blogs are my favourite for this reason. Whatever shows up on them, is new for that time. It has something that you didn’t know before. Of course, a lot has to do with the main focus of the blog. It’ll be unfair to expect original¹ posts from a blog like “Techcrunch”, because that’s not the focus of the blog. “Techcrunch” is supposed to report happenings on the Internet. But believe me, I skip over those posts everyday. I only read the posts where there is speculation and revelations, based on data that only people in those circles know about. This is also the reason why I like “GigaOM” and “A List Apart” so much. Almost every post says something new.

One reason for this behaviour is probably the notion that a blog which posts frequently gets more readers. I’m sorry to say that’s not true. In fact, it has been shown that too many posts is the top reason why people unsubscribe to a blog’s feed. Unless you’re blogging on commission and have a quota to reach for a week or month, putting up posts that contain nothing new may actually be detrimental to your blog. I have unconsciously reduced my posting frequency here at Geekaholic, choosing to post in my link list when I don’t have much to add to, but have an opinion for other posts/news. A 400 word article is not always necessary.

Raising the point of journalism vs. blogging, I’ll say that news papers today have become so commercialised, that journalists and bloggers can now be compared at the same level. That is also the reason why the comics and the editorial page are my most frequented ones.

Change the trend

Steven Rubel made a new year’s resolution to quit what he calls the ‘lazysphere’, and I second it. Let’s get our thinking caps back on and write what ‘we’ want to write, should write. Don’t write to land up on Digg (which is hard enough), write because you have something genuine and personal to add to the blogosphere. Write to be heard, not to be known. Reduce the number of posts per week if you need time to come up with quality content. A good post every fortnight is more than welcome, but what you should understand is that the post, not the time it takes, is what we like.