I just read an article called 34 reasons why readers unsubscribe from your blog. It seems that one of top 10 reasons why people stop reading a blog are frequent changes in focus. I really didn’t know that… Hell, going by my own reading habits, I subscribe to a bucket load of blogs that are as random as they get. But I guess not all people like that.
If you haven’t noticed, “frequent changes in focus” is my middle name. Ok, actually my middle name is Grzegorz, but you probably won’t be able to pronounce it. :P
I guess this rule applies more to those who actually blog about a specific topic. In their case, subscribers read them for a specific reason – because they share interest in that given topic. If you deviate from it, and start ranting, rambling or talking about nothing, some may loose interest. That’s something to be expected.
But if you never established a concrete topic, and you are random all the time, I think readers come to expect it. For example, I don’t think I could post anything off-topic here because there is no topic, or direction to this. I post about stuff that either interest me, or piss me off. That’s what I do, and that’s what the few people who read me probably expect.
Or perhaps, change of focus here would be switching from my random mode, to some specific narrow niche topic and sticking with it. Like changing this to a Java developper blog. Or something excusively about Ruby… But tha’s not something that I would want to do.
Meh… Screw that guy and his list. Screw consitency! Screwdriver!* Random content FTW!
* – denotes completely random content
[tags]blogging, blog, subscribing, unsubscribing, readers[/tags]
Great post! I, for one, come here often (although this is my first comment) because you have a specific topic: random topics!
ZZZZzzzzzz…..
No really,
I guess I have the same problem sometimes :) when an article is more than a page long, I quickly loose interest sometimes :)
I think it’s because a computer screen doesn’t read as fine as a piece of paper (at least, not my eye-damaging crt spacetaker I have here at home :P)
Oddly, it’s mine too.
Ricardo – welcome! Glad to have you here. :)
Wikke – I had that problem too, but then it passed. I think reading Steve Yegge trained me to put up with really long posts. He writes about really interesting stuff, but he is long winded as hell.
hdw – :mrgreen:
I like random, random is good
I think being random all the time is just as focused as talking about one thing all the time, but more interesting :mrgreen:
Plus, there is a bit of a focus as caused by what things you’re interested in – if you suddenly posted something about.. I don’t know.. let’s say fishing, it would feel like a change of direction because it wouldn’t really fit with all the computer-guy stuff that went before it
Keep being random, it’s what makes it terminally-incoherent.
Whatever. It’s terminally-incoherent. I liked the orange, and you had a funny article.
I watched Idiocracy finally.
Progress to this page please: http://tinyurl.com/2c7vrp