The Beat Goes On

One of the problems with blogging is that to keep whatever audience you may have. you have to be consistent about posting to your blog. Let’s face it: Americans in general and younger Americans in particular have short attention spans. Al that TV, you know.

So if there’s not something new on a web site or a blog, they’ll go somewhere else. Eventually—say, 2 or 3 days with nothing new—they’ll stop coming back.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking this morning over tea. But after further reflection I decided “So what?” Who cares?

After all, one of my biggest gripes about web sites in general and blogs in particular is that many of them don’t really have anything to say. Look at movies: how many movies have you seen lately? How many of them held your interest? And of those that held your interest, what exactly was it that held you? Plot? Characterization? Or special effects?

It’s the same thing with web sites: I can’t tell you the number of web sites I’ve visited that use special effects (Flash, Shockwave, JavaScript, etc.) to hide the fact that they really don’t have any useful content.

Case in point: I recently visited a corporate web site to find out information about a particular product. It was a beautiful presentation, complete with high-quality animated graphics. The mood conveyed by the graphics was one of serenity and relaxation—just what one looks for in a cup of tea. But nowhere on the site could I find information about the particular product I wanted. I know the product exists, as I was drinking a cup of it!

Now, had the web site belonged to, say, a web design company what wanted to show potential clients some of their work, it would have been a perfect fit. But for a company that sells tea, there was too much sizzle and not enough steak. Or, as we used to say about a certain kind of cowboy when I was living in Texas, “All hat and no cattle.”

So there’s another potential blog problem: posting an entry when you really don’t have anything to say.

Which, I guess, is one of the beauties of RSS feeds: by subscribing to a feed, the information gets sent to you whenever it changes or is updated. You don’t have to waste your time checking back to see if anything has changed.

So that’s my resolution for my blogs: if I don’t have anything to say, I won’t say it.