zole.org

When I started a blog I promised myself I wouldn’t apologize for not updating. I hate it when people apologize for not updating their blogs. If your blog is mediocre, and statistically speaking it probably is, it’s pretty damn presumptuous to think that anyone was really missing it. And if your blog is really good, then it’s free reading material, and nobody has any right to hold you to a schedule.

That said, I feel bad for letting my nascent blog collect dust for over a year. But I promised. So how about this: I haven’t updated my blog, and fuck you.

It’s hard to write a good blog. My respect for the people who write interesting posts on a regular basis has gone way up since I gave it a shot. When I was doing Death To The Extremist it was easy — well, possible — to churn out updates on a schedule, because I just had to pick a topic and think about it until something funny emerged. With a blog you have to actually say something interesting and new about the topic. Or I guess you could also just link to something interesting and new and then say something lazily snarky about it.

Actually, the bigger difference between publishing a blog versus a comic seems to be getting readership. This is the behavior pattern I’ve noticed in myself, and I suspect it’s common: if someone links me to a particular installment of an online comic, I’ll read it and then I’ll read a few more strips in the archives. If they’re all pretty good, I’ll probably come back to that comic. But when someone links me to a blog post, even if it’s really good and I add it to del.icio.us and everything, I will invariably close the tab after I’ve read it and go about my Internet business. The only way I’ll ever see that blog again is if they write something else that gets linked around. Only then, and only if I remember the blog from before, will I then add it to my RSS reader. I guess that kind of serves as a quality/notability filter, but it makes me an awfully tough audience.

I was super fortunate to have carried over some readers from DTE, and I’ve probably lost all of them because of the radio silence. I’m OK with that, though. Part of DTE’s undoing was that I started caring too much about the amount of readership I was getting (or not getting, I guess), and that’s too much dang pressure. So if I’m still on your RSS reader, look forward to more posts and even more relaxed standards of quality! There’s also a surprise or two in the pipeline. Okay, not two. One, tops.