I’m interested in what you say about kindling an keeping interest on blogs and that when you wrote every day, you attracted more traffic and commentary. Momentum certainly plays a powerful role in such a twitchy practice as link-blogging or quick throw-an-idea-out-there blogging. And I do know that my students get swept up in the pacing of the twelve-week semester when they blog for class and find it difficult to follow or maintain blogs without that kind of ritual, pattern, practice.

As a dedicated slow-blogger who uses Twitter for the quick pointer, comment, idea and update, I know that very few of the 300 or so subscribers to this blog actually read my lengthy posts in any depth. And that’s absolutely fine, actually, because I am blogging in a way that runs counter to the way the practice is evolving for most. I’ll keep using this practice to sharpen my writing, to deepen my thinking and to experiment while connecting to others.

Christopher,

Thanks for the comment and the links to your classroom blogging. I am always delighted to see people use social software to connect students to their own processes and to one another and the world, blending informal and formal learning spaces, and giving them the chance to direct their own learning as much as is possible. I’ll be interested to follow your blogging.

~Barbara

I would also love to get classes collaborating. Clay Burell and I started working towards that last year with the 1001 Flat World Tales Project. This year, I’m teaching Freshman. But I’d love to help get other teachers and classes at my school involved in online collaboration.

I’m more apt to linger when in surf mode if what I find initially seems novel or strikes some chord in me and flip through a lot of other stuff that doesn’t pass those tests.

I would guess that folks who’d linger on what you write have done some blogging on their own so they can better appreciate your contribution, but there’s no way of knowing that except through Comments or TrackBack.

If people are in multi-processing mode when they arrive at your site there is probably not much you can do to keep their attention and encourage them to click through. I know I had more serious readers when I was posting every day, so they could develop an expectation of something new from me. Now my rhythms, which are more idiosyncratic, probably don’t match theirs and the readership has definitely fallen off.

Thanks for the feedback about how I use archives and create tags; I agree that I don’t necessarily make it easy for readers to move around within my posts, those deep within the archives. I will rethink my tags and archives and, well, the design of this blog to make the useful posts among the hundreds here more easily accessible.

I also think, though, that readers don’t click through the links I do weave into posts, links back to other posts, especially in a slow-blog like mine (or yours). We ask our readers to sit with us for a while; looking at my blog stats, I’m not convinced people really do that. And when I look at my Bloglines reader and see how many posts I have not read during this summer largely away from the blogosphere, I’m not sure how many of those posts I’m willing to sit down with– So you’re right, and it makes sense, I have to earn my readers and keep them with me if that’s what I am after. Of course, luckily, I mostly blog for my own edification, to wrestle with the tangled threads of thoughts and discoveries, hoping to make sense of them, and if someone else joins me in conversation, the way you do, pushing me to clarify or to do better, that’s a gift.

Interesting comment about reposting on themes that are important but that you’ve written about in the past. First a technological suggestion on that and then a different type of response.

You are quite diligent on tagging your posts, but I only found your Archive by Categories on the left by deliberately looking for it just now. I have to scroll down to find it and the only time I’d do that otherwise is if I’m already reading one of your posts and then I’m not apt to look at the left. So unless you have a within page link at the top to the Archive, I’m probably going to miss it altogether. The related issue is whether the categories you use for your tags strike my fancy. If the tags didn’t ring my bell I wouldn’t be apt to look. Looking now at your list, a handful pique my interest.

The other remark is whether there has to be some invention to spark the writing and if so whether that can happen when dwelling on familiar themes. I think the answer should be yes but sometimes its hard. If the ideas aren’t fresh for you, how can you deliver them in a convincing way for the readers? You do a great job of it so somewhere you must be working invention in. But how?