Complaints and compliments

Now this is the sort of complaint I wouldn't mind hearing more of. Folio magazine's Tony Silber is upset that I don't publish this blog more often. It would seem that Tony thinks this blog (and one written by my friend David Shaw) are "excellent" but "way too infrequent."

I'll admit to having fallen behind in my productivity of late. Heck, I'll admit to having fallen behind in everything. Since the birth of my daughter a few weeks ago, I sometimes go the entire day without even washing my face. I'm learning the hard way that 47 is far too old to be a first-time father. So I wasn't even aware of Tony's remarks until my friend and fellow blogger Matt Mullen posted a comment to this blog to tell me about it. (It was Matt who graciously suggested that I could take an infrequency "complaint as a compliment, i.e. readers actually read your stuff and want to see more." And I decided to adopt Matt's glass-half-full interpretation.)

So what is the frequency of this blog? and does it matter?
A quick look at my publishing software shows that I've posted an average of 17 items a month to this blog since it began in late 2004. That's a pretty decent level of productivity, I figure. But those numbers have dropped considerably in recent weeks. In May I posted only nine items. In June I posted only seven.
Now I can argue that quality is more important than quantity in blogging. And some of the items in recent weeks have been pretty good, if I do say so myself. But user stats don't lie, and it's clear that the drop in frequency has an impact -- page views in the second quarter were 15.4% lower than in the first quarter.

David, Martha Spizziri and I will be speaking about blogging next week at the ASBPE National Conference. I'm sure that frequency will be among the topics we'll address.
In the meantime, I'm going to have to face one key fact -- I have too much going on these days. Something is going to have to give. But I promise it won't be this blog.

For David's reaction to the Folio piece, click here.
To see what Rex, who has no problems with frequency, said, click here.

tags: journalism, b2b, media, trade press, magazines, newsletters, business media