Blog Clog

Like Glen, I have been blogging at a relatively slow rate in recent months. He attributes his slowdown to the depletion of his stock of bloggable ideas. I blame my slowdown on a different cause: other pressing commitments. I've got plenty I'd like to blog about, but not the time to do so. To join Glen in analyzing the problem in economic terms, I suppose you would say that high opportunity costs have lately reduced my incentives to blog.

I'm not too worried about the fate of Agoraphilia, however. Like the commentators on Glen's post, I think that the widespread of use of feed services has made it less imperative for us to maintain a high volume of posts. Thanks to Bloglines, for instance, I still read everything posted at Tasty Research, even though it offers a new post only every couple of weeks or so. As I observed earlier,"Blogging has already empowered nobody writers to reach the world. In a world without news feed services, however, blogs that don't frequently offer new content risk losing their readers. No matter how much you like a blog, it's a pain to pull it up time and again only to find the same old stuff. News feeders solve that problem by making it nearly cost-free to keep tabs on your favorite, but relatively quiescent, blogs." (Unlike Glen, I have no qualms about openly recycling timely material.)

Still, I look forward to hearing more about Glen's plans to enliven Agoraphilia. Given his worldview, I'm supposing that it will involve paying we co-authors on a per-post basis. As Glen knows better than most, incentives matter!