Writing less on your blog

I saw a post today from Matt Gemmell, a prolific writer and blogger here in Scotland and it crystallised a couple of things I’ve been half-thinking for a while.

If you’ve wanted to start blogging but felt reluctant, I’d like to invite you to shift your perspective. Write less, and be at peace with it. It’s your site, and your rules. Blogs were originally a kind of diary, and they were mostly repositories of short pieces, not huge articles. It’s an absolute fallacy that longer works are better, or more valuable; indeed, shorter pieces are more likely to be read and digested, which intrinsically increases their value.

I’ve definitely been guilty of this myself, which is one of the reasons I started doing my monthly updates, as a bit of a forcing function to actually put something on my website. But Matt is very right about the early days of blogging, when the bar for ‘a post’ felt a lot lower and I’d often put out two or three short posts in a week - links, brief commentaries, snippets of interesting things. I miss doing that, so I’m going to start doing it again, starting with this very post.

meta blogging linkpost