Bijan Sabet

The life span of a blog post

Blogging has come a long way since I started first reading blogs and since my first blog post (old blog on typepad).

They have evolved from a pure publishing one to many model into a two way system where follow/follower, comments, reblogs, and “likes” provide a whole new experience.

But one thing I’ve noticed is that a blog post may receive a fair amount of interaction on the first day, little if any interaction on day 2 and it drops off big time after that. Even though Google directs a nice chunk of traffic to older posts, the interaction is still low.

Compare that with an message board. Head over to a forum like dpreview and you’ll see a conversation going about a particular camera or lens that started a month ago and is still on fire.

And those message board tools haven’t changed significantly in years. The don’t have threading or email replies that modern platforms like Disqus offers. Nor do they easily allow sharing of images, videos, links etc. There isn’t a follow/follower model.

I’d love to hear any thoughts on why blog posts don’t “live long” from an interaction standpoint or maybe my perception is wrong. I don’t think it’s the content. The quality of the content I read on blogs is quite high (and certainly better than message board posts).