Announcing a change: less blog posts, more essays

Dear Readers,

I have made the decision to seriously decrease the number of short blog posts and 'news / comment blurbs' in order to spend a lot more time on writing longer (and better) essays that can go a bit deeper than the average blog post. If there is one thing I have come to not like about blogging it may be the realization that it  has gently pushed me into a different level and style of writing, i.e. into keeping it short and making sure that my posts are  'easy reads', in order to get more traffic and build a larger audience.

This is something that has been concerning me for quite some time now so I have decided to go ahead and try an experiment, starting immediately, and only publish longer essays and things that are more ambitious in terms of the reader's attention span (and my own writing standards). This means you will hear less from me, going forward, but when you do, it will hopefully be worthy of your serious consideration!

Thanks for making a note of this. Comment below, if you wish.
Cheers,  Gerd Leonhard

Comments

[Hamish MacDonald]

Good luck with the new policy, Gerd.
Totally agree with your new direction. The world should not turn into an SEO-driven race to collect the largest possible number of Lowest Common Denominators.

Quality over Quantity.
Wisdom over Chatter.
Impact over Reach.

I reckon Google's core competence at Search is breaking due to SEO abuse. This year for the first time I started using Ask.com more than Google. (There appears to be more organic variety in Ask searches).

[Ken Kennedy]

Great idea, Gerd. I think you're a plenty deep enough thinker for this to be of value, and there is a continuum of tools on the Net you can use when varying between deep, long posting (your blog), and short notes (Twitter, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia.com). I deal with the same tension between short blurbs and long posts myself (with about 1/1000th the audience *grin*), and find myself trying to do as you're doing. Good luck!!

[Steve Lawson]

Sounds like a good idea Gerd - maybe you should get a Twitter/Jaiku account for just sharing links of interest with people - you can put the widget or feedburner-feed on your front page, and people who want to get a regular feed of the web things that are tweaking your interest could subscribe to it?

I tend to write longer posts, just because I'm a words kinda guy, and it definitely dents your traffic (interestingly, my traffic was the highest it ever was when I was blogging every day about the European Elections back in 2004... maybe I should switch from solo bass playing to political punditry... :o)

Either way, as you know, I greatly enjoy your blog, and always find plenty to make me think and question the way things...

Steve
http://www.stevelawson.net - solo bassist, ambient/jazz/electronica
http://steve.anthropiccollective.org - blogness