Keyvan Nayyeri

Blog Posts Per Month is a ratio that many bloggers care about it, especially those bloggers who have blogged for a longer time actively. After some months of blogging, you'll notice that keeping up a blog can be hard at some points and this is due to many parameters both in the professional and personal life.

A short while ago I noticed a drop in my posts per month ratio that never been less than 20 in the past three years. At that time I noticed that same thing is happening for many other bloggers on the .NET community. I don't like to blog about blogging so didn't write about it but a few days ago Scott Hanselman twitted about noticing this fact on his blog. We had a Twittation (a shorten of Twitter Conversation by me!) about this (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

At that time I thought that this is temporary and things would change with a new release from Microsoft or a big community event. Two days ago Microsoft released ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 but it didn't change things much so I reactivated this thread again! Although I still don't like to blog about blogging but this is more related to the .NET community in general.

As I had replied to Scott, blogging activity should have a seasonal statistical model that would be easy to model, prove and predict with Time Series. Some sites like Technorati can even do this for the whole blogosphere.

We've experienced this seasonal behavior many times before and it has happened on weekends or new year holidays regularly. But this time it has taken longer than normal and we see that the number of community activities around .NET is dropped significantly.

This is not limited to blogosphere because if you go back and forth and monitor the number of articles and tutorials on the .NET communities, then you'll notice same thing. At least I've monitored this for ASP Alliance and DotNetSlackers myself. These famous and active community don't have much outcome like the past.

Some community activities are not very popular for the people anymore. As of blogging, I see that not only we don't see new active bloggers (with a real technical stuff) but also we see the growing number of link blogs and bookmark blogs that just link to existing content. Please don't go wrong about this statement. I do like link blogs and we have great and very well-known link bloggers but I'm talking about those many new blogs that don't add anything new to the world (this is my own opinion but you may challenge me)! On the other hand, it seems that there is less interest for writing articles and tutorials and people don't try to work on such stuff anymore. Nowadays Indians are the biggest group of people who write articles and tutorials and this would have logical reasons as well.

I can guess some reasons for these changes at the moment but let me talk about them later in a separate post.

I didn't have time to gather data and model this pure conversation to prove what I'm talking about but if you have some free time, that would be very helpful for the community to do this. This can be even an important work to be done by Microsoft on a regular basis. We need to have a classic analysis of all types of community activities and their changes per day, per week or per month! This can be a part of the position that I suggested in a blog post recently. At least, it can help to predict the future and avoid bad things to happen before they happen!

For myself (like Scott, Phil or many other bloggers), same thing is happening. In the past a few months I've always been on 20-22 posts per months which is the minimum number that I've had in the past three years. In this while a few times I thought about closing this blog seriously. I think that blogging is not adding much to the world like the past. At least for myself this is true and if I don't blog then I can do much better things and use my time in a better way. Semantic web may challenge blogging (in its common term) and change it a lot. These days I think that blogging is taking much time from me!