Sometimes I think aloud on Twitter in 140 characters or less.

Misuse of punctuation and sometimes dubious word shortening aside, Twitter is pretty good for random, pithy musings. In the case of my update above, none of the folks following replied to this muse.

In 2009 I won’t be subscribing to any of the high volume, often multi-authored posting blogs, like Techcrunch, Mashable, Techdirt, Read/Write/Web, Boing Boing, Engadget, etc. If these blogs post something that catches my eye it will have to be through the filter of others that I am reading (am sure that will happen). This isn’t because these sites aren’t worth reading, it’s because they simply hog too much of my time. Google Reader trends shows how many posts per day blogs you follow are making over a 30 day period. Mashable, for example, shows 8.0 posts a day which to me is 5 posts too time hoggy. If Pete Cashmore is listening, please consider creating a separate best *3* post a day full RSS feed for readers like me.

Would like to subscribe to these blogs if they would consider offering a best of the day full text RSS feed option. And if any of these publications take this suggestion, please use the comments below and/or trackback to tell me about it. I realize that by filtering using something like Y! Pipes or FeedRinse I could hack up these busy sites feed into only showing a maximum number of posts, and I might be motivated to do that in 2009, but in the meantime it’s goodbye to all blogs, big and small blogs alike, who average more than three posts a day. Having read from the RSS firehose for a few years I’ve come to the following 6 brutal conclusions about blogs:

1. no blogs where a writer tries his/her best goes without writing at least one high quality post eventually
2. most blogs rarely have a high quality blog post
3. some blogs are lucky to have one high quality blog post a month (or even less infrequent)
4. even fewer blogs are lucky to have one high quality blog post a week
5. the fewest blogs out there are lucky to have one high quality blog post per day
6. no blogs have more than an average of three good quality blog posts per day

Let’s take these one at a time. With #1 it shows that time and effort eventually pay off. This is a tenet in life that works far outside the blogging realm. Don’t give up my fellow blogging bretheren.

#2 is what I think of as the scrapblogging mindset. What I put in a scrapbook is of interest to me. Maybe of great interest, but will it be to you? So many sites have tried to spawn services around this like Stumbleupon, Friendfeed, etc. I think the best of what I’m interested in finds its way into a blog post someday. The rest of that stuff is there for those who want to see the whole slushpile. I know those type people are out there, I’m just not one of them.

#3 and #4 fit most of the blogs I’m subscribed to and most interested in. Posts that strike a nerve about once a month on average. So in the case of firehose blogs like the ones mentioned above, I don’t see the point in skimming thousands of posts to find a dozen or so every month that I enjoy a great deal.

I can’t come up with any blogs that fit #5 or #6, can you?

I would like bloggers to filter their best stuff for me. Put on the editor’s hat and be picky about your own work. I’m asking you, readers with blogs having more than three posts, to go one further step each day: take the best three of each posts you make every day and put them in a standalone full text RSS feed that readers like me can subscribe to. Here’s the rules:

1. you can’t change posts throughout the day, three maximum posts in this feed. You are welcome to edit the posts as normal, but you can’t change to an entirely different post
2. if you have already selected your three best posts, tough, you’ll have to wait to publish to me tomorrow as one of your best three posts of the day
3. bonus: if you already make less than three posts a day on average you need change nothing

For those using Wordpress who publish more than three posts a day on average you could do something like I’m describing above without using a plugin. Just create a new category and mark that for your featured posts each day. Then provide readers like me the option to subscribed to this featured post category. By default Wordpress creates RSS feeds for each category.

Of course It’s ok to publish more than three posts per day

I’m not challenging the business aspect of why some blogs post more – a lot more – than necessary. The more you publish, the more you push your message and blog brand if you will out there, the more chances you’ll have to grab eyeballs and mindshare. I get the business and promotional part of publishing 10 or more posts a day and have even suggested to bloggers in the past that the best way to increase your readership is to increase both the quality and number of posts published per day. I don’t think there is any blog out there that couldn’t increase readership by focusing on making the highest quality three posts max per day. Beyond that number there is this nagging little consequence of increased frequency:

Readers don’t have time.

We will make time if the material is very good, but what is good to me and good to you is subjective. I’ve had this discussion over what makes a quality blog post before and it usually goes nowhere that everyone agrees upon. That’s ok. One thing, however, that is not subjective is quantity. Give two readers three fish to eat and they both have three fish to eat.

Not monopolizing reading time

As you post more, readers invariably will skim more of what you write. Post less frequently, focusing more on quality and guess what happens? You create scarcity. It’s the whole author publishing one book a year on average scenario. If you follow many popular authors the trend is to publish a new hardcover once a year. The paperback comes out about six months after the hardcover and then promotes the upcoming hardcover book. If somebody like Stephen King posted a new novel say every three months some of his most passionate readers might be all giddy but slower readers like me would get behind and buy fewer of his books.  So a little scarcity blog posting analogous treatment could be a good thing.

Hey, when XYZ publishes something it’s worth stopping and reading the whole thing.  I may not see another XYZ post for __ hours.

Versus:

Oh man, not another post from XYZ. Don’t need to read this very closely because another will be along in ___ minutes.

In 2009 I must cut some corners on how my time is allocated online. There are areas I’d like to increase my time spent and yet need to reduce my time overall. One of the cuts is I’m going to (try) using only one RSS reader. Most people probably only use one RSS reader anyway and I’m the rare geek who uses more than one regularly. Google Reader doesn’t have all the features I want, but it’s about as close to useful and integrated with my Google account and bookmarks as any other RSS reader, so that’s the direction I’m choosing for 2009. For now, at least. Maybe that will change later this year.

Gone will be using ReBlog as I’ve done the last three years. This means my shared OPML file on the homepage of RSS feeds being followed will change. I believe Google Reader offers a way to share my OPML, but not sure as of this writing that it can be dynamically generated and accessed. On the list to-do list.

My preference in 2009 is not to cut back on the number of RSS subscriptions, heck I’d like to increase the number to get a wider variety of sources, but some additional quality control is needed.

1,095 posts a year is still a lot

I’m looking in the mirror here too, trust me. I won’t be publishing any more than *3* posts a day on average in 2008 at this blog. If you do the math you can figure out the maximum number of blog posts you could see published here in 2009 will be:

365 days x 3 posts per day = 1,095 posts

How many posts were published at Hmm in 2008? 225, an average of about 19 posts per month and included three months where there were less than 10 posts for the month (yowsa, a post every other day on average during those months). I might have gone to the other extreme. My published post goal for 2009 is at least 500 posts. We’ll see how that goes.

2008 was the lowest number of posts published in a year here to date and had a frequent reader remark to me that “you aren’t posting as much any more.” He’s correct. There was a couple back to back months in the past (April 2005 - 140 posts, May 2005, 2005 – 145 posts) where I published more blog posts than all of 2008. We’ll see how this 2009 max 3 posts per day plan will go. Could fall off the wagon, you never know. That would be hmm inspiring.

As I’m going back through with my editor’s hat on, having the benefit of time and distance (very important editorial skill, mind you), some of the posts made in these heavy quantity months were lower quality. Some of them are like a link or two with a picture. To make it worse some of the links are broken in the shorter posts. I’ve been working my way back through these anemic posts bulking them up and trying to make crepe out of crap with footnotes so I can not be embarassed that my name is on them going forward. Some other bloggers I’ve talked with have indicated that the archive posts are old news and not worth updating but I don’t share those feelings.

Does this mean that some days in 2009 there could still be more than three posts? Sure, an average is just that: average. But I’m going to try and stay away from doing much burst publishing unless there is a really good reason (like I enter another blogathon or live blog an event perhaps). In fact, most of the post you’re reading if you got this far (thanks!) was written in a day when three posts had already been published. So I held it over and finished this morning. There will be other days when I don’t have enough time to write and publish three posts.

Your turn. What do you think of this max 3 post per day average feed limit? Good idea, bad idea? I think there are a lot of bloggers who would love to be able to publish 1,095 posts a year, so this is speaking more to the larger, multi-authored blogs who, right or wrong, gobble a little too much time with their current firehose publishing output. We’ll see how many of these blogs care about keeping readers like me subscribed.

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• RSS Feed cleanup part deux, 250 feeds target
• Hmm quickies #40 and reaching 10,000 posts marked ‘publish’
• New year RSS reads and resolutions [site news]
• 10 (deadly sins) ads in a single RSS feed post, get out of here
• Please don’t go Feedburner promo link crazy like this
• Happy 4th of July and 5th blog birthday MakeYouGoHmm