Non-topical blogging

On a day with four blog posts (and followed by a day with two more), econblogger Mark Thoma wrote:

Every once in awhile I [Thoma] kind of need a bit of a break . . . I ran out of energy a few weeks ago . . . I’ll do my best until then, daily links at least somehow and short “echo” posts as usual, but I doubt I’ll have time to say much myself . . . [There’s a reason I haven’t missed a day posting to the blog in over eight years. When I first started, I was afraid that if I missed a day new readers would bail out . . . I realize a missed day won’t kill the blog at this point, but it’s still important to me to keep posting every day.]

What I do is post once a day; when I write new posts, I schedule them for the future. I currently have approx 2-month lag. Sometimes I post 2 or 3 times in one day, if I have something topical or just something I feel like posting on. Overall, though, I find a benefit to the lag. Posts that are less topical (not tied to the news or to a current online discussion) have more of a chance to stand on their own.

Thoma’s blog is different from mine; much of its influence comes from him being on top of current debates. Still, I think some lag would be fine. Among other things, it would remind people of important discussions from one or two months ago.

3 thoughts on “Non-topical blogging

  1. Brad DeLong does this with posts that revisit issues, including whether his beliefs were right or wrong. He can fit these in when …

  2. Pingback: Links for 08-02-2013 | Symposium Magazine

  3. I stepped outside my usual blogging to address an article in Science which I saw today. It doesn’t pass the smell test to me:

    http://www.entsophy.net/blog/?p=112

    What’s interesting is that I believe they likely did find a correlation and the two variables are causally related, but I still seriously doubt their main conclusion.

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