Blogging is easy

Jakob Nielsen would disagree. I don’t agree with him entirely, but I think he makes an excellent point when he says (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html):
“Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you’re searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.”
I’ve certainly had that experience as a user. He goes on to talk about how this affects your brand as an expert:
“It might take you only an hour to write a blog posting on some current controversy, but a thousand other people can do that as well (in fact, they’ll sometimes do it better, as shown above). And customers don’t want to pay for such a tiny increment of knowledge. Sure, sometimes a single paragraph holds the idea that can increase a site’s conversion rate so much that a reader should have paid a million dollars to read it. But they don’t know that in advance, so they won’t pay.
In contrast, in-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn’t add up to Shakespeare. They’ll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren’t integrated and that don’t give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic — even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.
Thorough content’s added value can rise above the threshold where customers become willing to be separated from their money. This is the true measure of a sustainable business.”
I try to strike a balance. I’m not convinced that no one wants an essay — in my experience, the essays are usually the most highly-linked posts and certainly the ones that generate the most long-term traffic. And I can’t help but agree with Nielsen that they’re the ones that do the most to build my credibility as an expert with potential consulting clients.

Of course, a good writer will always use the minimum number of words necessary to tell the story. On the other hand, the story must be told in such a way that it has value. Sometimes that means a short story, sometimes longer. Write to the need of the audience — not to an arbitrarily fixed minimum or maximum number of words.

I think there is certainly room for both quick hits and longer essay style posts. In fact, Amy Gahran suggested that there were seven posting “styles,” which I’ve outlined here: http://activerain.com/blogsview/75352/Project-Blogger-Seven-Blog

Interesting point and definitely eye catching topic. Would a 15 second post be better suited for the world of micro blogging?

whatever the opinions… it obviously works.
thanks for the push!