As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of The E-learning Curve Blog, I haven’t been corresponding with my usual regularity; this isn’t a case of blog fade, but rather is because of unusually heavy work commitments.
It’s uncomfortable for me not to be able to correspond, as I’m serious about my commitment to the activity, and in my view it’s a great discipline to set yourself a target of writing 500-1000 words a day of publishable material. Much as in my daily attempts to run or go to the gym, I believe that if you can find a good reason not to undertake this task, sooner or later you’ll find a bad excuse, and then the whole thing falls apart.
Even though I have not had the time to blog, I have been keeping an eye on my blog stats, and I’m pleased (even gratified) to find that the number of hits on my blog has not reduced by any significant margin.
Interesting.
What can this suggest? Intuitively, I would consider that if a blog isn’t updated frequently, then access and usage would drop off over time, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case.
Based on my blogs metrics, the number of hits via RSS – the daily feed – have gone down: obviously if I’m not posting regularly, the RSS doesn’t update, and subscribers have no new content to access. The other useful metric – number of hits through searches – has increased to the degree that it’s actually compensating for the fall-off in RSS-based or return viewers.
This suggests to me that an appreciable number of people are using my blog as an information-, knowledge- and learning resource, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the core value of my blog, and it’s certainly the reason that I subscribe to the blogs I read on a regular basis. I tend to write in what I call part-works and occasional series. For example, I will take a topic, such as open-source software for learning, and undertake a multi-part exploration of the topic over a period of time (usually about two weeks or so). This, I feel, enables me to cover a subject in some depth, but without overloading the reader with too much information in any given blog post.
In my occasional series posts, I will return to a particular theme over time. I find that this approach is especially useful when discussing new or fast-changing stories like elearning and the current recession.
It seems that what has emerged over the last year or so is that I have created an archive of material that addresses the needs and concerns of a significant number of other learning and development professionals. Hopefully I have also managed to challenge some preconceptions about the e-learning industry, and inspire others to enter into a dialogue with me about the nature of our profession, with the ultimate aim of enhancing the role of elearning as an means to educate.
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