Fools seldom differ, Day 26 of the blog frequency experiment

It seems that Ken Henderson and I have been trying the same experiment, without knowing about it. For the last month (actually 26 days to be precise) I comitted to myself to blog every day, partly as I had been lax in my blogging and also because I knew there would be a lot going on with RTM and launch. My conclusions are different than Kens, although with good reason I think.

By moving to the daily model I have been forced to post short entries mostly with links to other locations/information, with one exception, I've felt a little guilty about this but reconciled to myself that this was the price for the frequent updates, as like Ken I have a day job.

Now comes the interesting question, did this result in more or less reads of my blog? Well if we assume the quality of the content is the same and that this is just a frequency + stye of posting change, the answer is it depends. There are 2 basic metrics in Community Server(this is a shame as we had better metrics in .Text) and I just take the std data (mrys has done some really interesting extended analysis on his, but thats WAY too much work for me) Page Views and Aggregated Views, these are pretty self explanatory. Historically my MSDN blog has had a far higher number of direct page views per post, somewhere in the region of 4x. This has been especially true since it became the root blog on msdn.microsoft.com/sql. From this I assumed that not that many people subscribe to the RSS feed in comparison with those that happen across the blog as an artifact of visiting the sql developer centre. The switch to more frequent blogging somewhat confirms that in that the number of direct page views goes down, but the aggregated number remains the same, I am guessing due to the fact that only the last 3 posts are listed in the root of the msdn

So back to the original question, is more(frequent) more or less? Well it really does depend, right now there has been a drop off in pages views but if you look at the number on a weekly, or monthly basis it would have depended on how frequently or infrequently I was blogging with my old approach of blog when there is something interesting, to get a comparison. In summary post viewings are down but weekly/monthly numbers are up.

But there is a bigger question, that Ken also discusses, in general I write this blog to share information, either my perspective on that information, or simply to make sure that people know about something, did that really change over the last 26 days? I didn't give much perspective, but by posting I am making a selection choice as to what I think is most important for you all to see/read, that is perspective in its lowest form. Ultimately only you can decide which offers the most value to you as the reader/consumer.

Now I did not make the blogging style change to dig into the viewing numbers but it has been interesting to watch, as things are starting to calm down a little after launch(at least in the US anyway) and with Thanks Giving and the Yukon Ship Party upcoming, I'm going to go back to less frequent but meatier posts. I've been working a series of entries called Std Demos, what I hope to do is walk through a bunch of the std demos that I have been doing at conferences over the last couple of years, partially to document them and also to remind folks of some of the new features in SQL Server 2005 that may have been forgotton about. Hopefully I'll start that next week, I have a bunch of the material written I just need to tweak my winsip account to host some of the files.