Its not everyday affair when you open up the newspaper and see one of the biggest heading on blogging (at least, in India). The heading read “What is slow blogging?”. That really took me by surprise and then the explanation to that was as follows -
It’s a movement that emphasises blogging after thoughtful consideration instead of hammering out posts in a surge of emotion. While succesful boggers are known to update their blog regularly and in a quick manner; slow blogging urges bloggers to slow down. It was branded by, Todd Sieling.
Now, this definitely sounds pretty good. However, is completely against the rules of blogging! And the basic rule of blogging is that there are no rules! Blogging is about expressing yourself and probably the above mentioned rule can be considered true for those who are trying to create niche blog or who are interested in building name, authority and branding themselves in a particular field.
One should not forget that the biggest part of the blogging is still personal blogging and that it still exists and people are creating blogs more than ever before. Those people will surely not like the concept of Slow Blogging or the idea of putting the brain behind writing a blog post, that’ll be considered more as article writing.
I feel sorry that most of the professional bloggers forget this point and start to think from the perspective that every blogger out there is doing exactly as they are doing and are trying to achieve the same goals from their blog. What’s your take on this? Have you felt that while reading my blog or other blogs lately?
Huh. Sounds to me like a fancy rationalization for not blogging regularly. My own blogging is sporadic (at best) — I think I'll adopt this excuse myself.
Seriously though. Although I agree with you that in blogging there are no rules (nor should there be), I think it would not be a bad thing if more people would give some "thoughtful consideration" before pounding out another post.
I agree that thoughtful consideration should be given while making the blog posts. But the question is that why exactly this kind of movement or anything of this sort is required? People who are interested in making money will push their websites to whole new level as we all know that more content will surely help in making more money. At least, adsense farms have already proven that and those who are interested in writing good content surely put good enough efforts to bring out quality content.
Mashable is definitely an exception!
Thanks for commenting on the manifesto. I find it important to emphasize that I don't propose slow blogging as a rule to follow. Instead, it's more about 'if you don't feel ready to write something on a blog, don't force yourself just to keep pace'. In other words, we completely agree that there are no rules on how to run a good blog except those we set for ourselves, keeping in harmony with our natural creative pace.
ah! that definitely sounds good! Indeed, I will surely support you on this one. I think now I get the real message. You wanted to target those bloggers who stopped thinking before making posts and started making posts just because all the A-list bloggers have suggested them to do so. Am I getting it right?
That's definitely what I had in mind, Mayank. Part of my concern is that the common wisdom that goes around about 'how to blog' has been shaped by the state of search engines, and that they give preference to frequently updated content. What's happened, in my mind, is that a fact about how search engines could be better tuned to the natural pace of creativity was turned into a failing of the human user, who is then framed as the weak link in the chain. If anything, search engines that rely too heavily on update frequency can be too easily tricked into serving lesser quality content. Thanks again for the reading and commentary!
I think the underlying motive here is to prevent people from knee-jerk blog posts that result in lynch mob blogging (e.g., a huge number of bloggers echoing certain emotional opinions regarding certain people and events) and to challenge them to think and weigh their emotions first before they fire off ranting.
If that's the intention, then I'm all for it.