I *AM* going to post someting, dammit. During a recent bout of bloggerly navel-gazing, I noticed that the month of May is the deadest time around this almost-but-not-quite-moribund enterprise. Over the last 3.5 years, that merriest of months has clocked an average of three – yes, three! posts, giving us a scorching posting rate of one post every ten days. So I guess I have that as a pseudo-explanation for the quietness around here – it's a seasonal thing. (For those interested – and of course you're interested, right? Hey, wait, come back here! The single postingest month ever... well, not ever, because I'm not counting Inappropriate Response because I don't feel like it... was January 2005 (37 posts!), the inaugural month; the second-most prolific month was February 2005 (29 posts!) – sensing a trend here? – and we've never gone above 20 posts in a month since then.)

So that's what the data show; but what does it mean? Reading Reid Stott's post on the decline and fall of websites like, ummm, this one, Reid comments about his own site:

Today, you first want to choose a niche topic for your blog, stick solely to that topic, and pound out a dozen or more posts per day on that topic. You probably want to have more than one person contributing to “your” blog, for the sake of volume and so you can take a day off now and then. And when there is a breaking news story within your niche topic, you need to post a pithy 800 word column on it within an hour of it breaking. [There's that old bitch goddess blog-success raising her head again — Ed.]

Then you have me, the Anti-Blogger. I post about anything and everything that’s on my mind or going on in my life. The only other person you’ll ever see posting on this site is my wife … to tell you I cannot move my fingers to do so myself. And as for that “breaking news” bit, well, Mr. Zeldman posted his article last Sunday, and seven days later I’ve finally gotten around to writing about it.

I’m lucky if I make a dozen posts in a month, never mind a day. It wasn’t always that way. Five or six years ago I seemed to be a lot less busy with Real Life than I am today, and there were often multiple posts per day. Today, any late night energy I might have goes instead to ticking off another item on my nightmarish “To Do” list.

Preach it, brother! I find myself saying, as I so often do when reading Mr. Stott. (Except when he talks about the Falcons. Whatever.) For whatever reason, Real Life seems more pressing and important now. There's yardwork to be done, house maintenance to perform, paying work to be attended to, computer languages to learn, etc., and they all seem far more important now than the urge to Find Someone On The Internet Who Is Wrong, And Correct Them, delightful as that often is.

Posted by David Fleck at 07 June 2008 09:09 PM