In a recent blog post, Paul Bradshaw pointed out how high profile bloggers became toned down and tamer in their opinions as more people started to read them more. I’m not sure myself I’ve become tamer but this blog has changed over the years as more people read it. While it’s still a space for me to extract thoughts from my head, I seem to use it less to figure things out as I type or even after I’ve published. i know I put up fewer very rough pieces that turn into something better in a later blog post.
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Ter recently chatted to me and expressed surprise that I wasn’t allowed to have a non-PC opinion about Spanish students, the noisy fuckheads, and I suppose a few years ago I could happily give out about them and anything else without people coming back to defend them or give out to me for generalising. That’s fair enough I suppose.
Now a lot more thought goes into the blog posts (no really), however personally I still need to share my amateurism with others and I do so over on Twitter these days. I think it’s important to have an outlet for being stupid, rough, rude and wrong but for me this here blog is no longer the place for all of that. Apart from when I talk about Chocolate and Crisps or Asparagus and wee. (Funnily enough I got the biggest reactions to those two silly and amateurish wonderings.)
We got talking about quality posts at the training event on Saturday and Sabrina talks more about it on her post here. It does seem that blog readers in fact can’t handle an over-abundance of “quality” and in-depth pieces.
This is what Sabrina has to say:
More importantly, however, people take in a massive amount of information from scores of blogs each day. I suspect your average reader can manage maybe one or two “heavy†posts from across all of their sources in a given day. If your blog is always the blog with the big ask for time and attention, you will actually lose rather than win readers with your dense but awesome content.
So if you do produce fantastic guides about various things, should you throttle back on them? Perhaps mix them up with fun and maybe “amateur” pieces? I feel this is right. I’m not saying dumb it down, rather don’t push the high-brow stuff too much. Make your readers think but perhaps don’t make your readers think TOO much? Like 3 times a day. 5 days a week too much. I think there are some out there who can belt out quality piece after quality piece and never dilute the value of the content but for anyone that reads them on a regular basis, these pieces actually will start to hurt.
At the same time it’s probably good for your creativity and brain power to screw around with things. To have uncoordinated, unplanned fun. Or stupidity.
Say something stupid today, your blog audience needs it.
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