Blogs are Disposable

You know it’s true. I mean, when was the last time you read a post of any blog that wasn’t the most recent post?

Why is it that we always gravitate towards the newest material? We only want to see the latest movies, either at the ciniplex or at the rental store. We only want to see the latest research in anything we are interested in.

The news is the same way. We don’t read old newspapers or old magazines for the most part. We read them quickly and throw them them away just as quickly. We are always looking for the next thing.

I think we sometimes need to work against this commonly-held belief that it’s old it doesn’t count. There are some jewels of knowledge hidden in previous blog posts, old newspapers, old stories, and old theories.

My old posts mean something to me. They are there for you to browse through if you choose to. But who has the time?

So old posts are discarded and never to be thought of again. At least, they aren’t recycled into a new edition like the daily newspapers are. The old posts remain. The titles call for your attention. But like the voices of the elders, we seem to be hastily moving forward all the time. Maybe this isn’t the best practice.

What do you think? Are blogs disposable? Do our voices matter?

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post as I will continue along this theme.


6 responses to “Blogs are Disposable”

  1. Oh! Our voices definitely matter, but yes, blogs are definitely disposable. Thousands are made a day and just as many are disgarded. It’s a content overload.

    Of course your words mean something to you, but they might not mean enough to someone else simple because that someone else has already had their fill by the time they get to you.

    It’s the law of diminishing returns, a rule which blogs follow. Subscribing and reading 3 blogs a day is great, but with each new blog the value that new blog gives me diminishes. Eventually, adding another blog does nothing for me. Sometimes it makes it worse. And so even if that blog has great content, I don’t want to hear about it because I’m already satisfied to my max.

    Throw archived posts into the loop, and you’re simply giving me a system overload.

    That’s the way I see it, anyway.

  2. Hi Oktober Five,

    I hear ya. I don’t have time to read all the blogs I follow either. It’s just amazing that we have these extensive archives that just don’t seem to be important.

    Hi Silverfish,

    Yup! No one wants to be overloaded by anything. He made a lot of sense.

  3. One thing bloggers do is put up a featured post on the front page. I’m currently trying that strategy. You can also “repost” old posts as new posts. It seems like such behavior may be frowned upon, but I honestly doubt many will notice. You could also do what I plan to do when I hit 365 posts, and simply start recycling. Then you’ll never have to write another post again!

  4. I shouldn’t be reading this post, since it’s your newest one! But I agree with you. There is gold in the old.

  5. Hi Oktober Five,

    When I did my welcome post last week, some of my readers remembered the posts I linked up there. So I’m not sure that reposting old posts will work. I think you’d lose some readers. No one seems to like reruns.

    Recycling could work as long as you make it fresh somehow.

    Hi ECD,

    Great minds thing alike (or at least agree with each other)