SH Sean Harding/blog
Three posts an hour? Really?!
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I may not post to my blog much, but I read a lot of blogs. In that sense, I could probably be called a blog addict. Thankfully, Google Reader makes managing a long list of blogs somewhat easy. Easier, at least, than the alternatives.

As adept as I am at following blogs, there are some I can never keep up with. And I just have to ask why? Why does posting dozens of items a day seem like a good idea? What reader wants that kind of volume? Not I. The biggest offenders in my list are the Gawker sites. Valleywag: 19 posts today. Defamer: 21 posts. Lifehacker: 23. Consumerist: 31 posts in the last ten hours. Three posts a freakin’ hour, all day long!!! Even if those were the only four blogs I read (as if), I’d have nearly a hundred posts to read/skim/ignore. And of course Gawker refuses to put the full post in their RSS feeds, regularly forcing me to click through to their site to even see if the article is of interest. Thanks, guys.

I suppose they’re hoping to drive up page views, ad revenue, etc. But I think that in the long run, they’re at risk of doing the exact opposite. Because their sites are so noisy, so filled with fluff, so infrequently posting something I actually care about, I’ve all but given up on reading them. I have the Gawker sites in their own folder in Reader, and I tend to just give them a cursory skim every few days. Sometimes I go a week or more without looking at them. If they could control themselves and provide a nice, tightly-edited blog with a few quality postings a day, I’d be a regular reader. Oh well. Their loss…

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