Day 4: To be consumed regularly.

Yes, I am irritated. You, who blog at least every other day and, actually, every day in the last week, all of a sudden stop posting? You have nothing to tell me for the entire 3 days?

Wait a minute, why is this frustrating? Isn’t the blog (or at least this particular blog) a personal journal on the Web? If the answer is “yes”, it would mean that a blogger should be free to post any time he or she wants to. It would mean that I am just given a chance to follow their life and thoughts and have to be grateful that they exist at all.

However, if I answer that a blog isn’t just a personal journal, it becomes a whole different issue. It then appears more like a paper or a magazine you subscribe to. Depending on the publication, you can expect to receive your copy daily, weekly or monthly, but you certainly want to know when. So if I perceive catching up on blog as my morning newspaper

and The Style Rookie as my daily fashion advisory, I can’t blame myself for being frustrated with silence.

Although blogs are nothing like structured and linear McLuhan’s print media, the readers still need blogs to follow certain patterns, maybe even more so as the blogosphere grows and matures. Probably, like Wikipedia or spoilers communities in Jenkins' Convergence Culture, the bloggers will have to develop and follow a set of more structured rules if they want to gain loyal readership and credibility.

So what started as a personal journal might have transformed over time into another responsibility, because there is the waiting audience to take into account.

Dear bloggers, to avoid frustration please post regularly.