Or, what serves who?
Does the blog serve the blogger, the reader, or both? Or, does the blogger serve the blog (including the format) and the readers? I realize these aren’t new questions, but I’d like to look at them in light of the blog format itself.
I’ll admit, I’ve got a love-hate relationship with blogging. There’s more than one reason for this, but one of reasons has to do with the format. One the one hand, the blog-post format allows for a piece to be written and published in relatively short time. Someone who doesn’t have time to (or chooses not to) research and write long pieces need not be held back from sharing good information or thoughts. On the other hand, blogging, being a type of journaling (weblogging), brings with it the expectation of fairly regular updating. In order to keep a blog updated, a blogger needs to write often. This, in turn, means that the topics written about need to vary a bit, else the blog will have little chance of holding anyone’s interest (including, probably, the blogger’s).
Yet, for those who like to explore topics thoroughly; i.e., those who like to examine, ponder, expand, mull, develop, and perhaps revise a topic over time, blogging may not be the best format. Perhaps blogging isn’t the best set-up for actually journaling these developments. Or is it? Might not a reader think, sheesh, this guy/gal is really obsessed/neurotic/psychotic and has no life...why doesn’t he/she write about something else for a change? Even if the blogger does write about other things, perhaps all that will stand out is the “main topic.” If a blogger has limited time to blog, it may be a burden to have to blog about other things while he/she is preoccupied – I mean occupied – with the “main topic.”
Tod Bolsinger wrote about what he termed “Blogging ADD” at the GodBlogCon blog:
One of the most challenging parts of trying to maintain an updated blog has been keeping a sense of focus on a subject to do it justice. While some bloggers [Mark D. Roberts, for example] do an exceptional job at it, most of us tend to jump from subject to subject based on what catches our attention, or our current interests.
Three questions this raises for me:
1) Is it necessarily bad to jump from subject to subject (i.e., is it bad for a blogger not to narrow down his/her many writing interests), and, do some/most readers actually expect it?
2) Is it possible for a blogger to have the opposite “problem;” i.e., to belabor one particular topic, if even different aspects of the topic are examined in different posts? Might it depend on the actual topic? Might it work better for a blogger to run a “series update” once per week, or once every two weeks, for example? Are regular, predictable updates better than "random" ones?
3) Does the blog/comments format affect the longevity of a comment-section discussion? Do comment threads reflect real-life discussion, or does the on-going-update nature of blogging necessitate that comment discussions only go on so long? (Do commenters lose interest in a comment discussion because the blog/their blog/life moves on, or because they simply tire of it naturally?)
In other words, does the blog format require certain uses, or can it be adapted to the purposes of those who use it? As with any social phenomenon, is it inevitable that the "major" bloggers will set the trends/standards for the way(s) the blog format is used?
