Quantity, Quality, Screaming, and Google Bombs

The gold mine of articles that informed me and lifted my spirits may require two different posts.

Yesterday I finally had to wipe out my reader when it blew past the 1000 mark for the fifth time.  This is something I've hinted at in the past, but now I'm going to put it rather bluntly.  In  an attempt to run up their hit counters, many bloggers play the Google bomb game.  There's nothing wrong with trying to influence your SEO by carefully crafting your title, but articles that are packed full of such obvious bombs is a turn-off.    They also err on the side of quantity rather than quality.  The end result is like screaming at your dog.  It doesn't work in dog training, and it probably doesn't work well in the blogoshpere. 

My reading speed is way above average and I am able to blow through a lot of material in a very short time.  However,  after several hours I just give up and delete my entire reader.  I routinely hit the highest sites on my list first, then start in on the others.  After becoming saturated with the "screaming", many no doubt fine articles end up being relegated to the trash bin.  That is sad.  If the goal is to become a news aggregator, fine.  But if you want to actually have people read what you've written, it might be best to cut back on the number of posts.

"Dr. Zero" and  the "American Thinker" sites are two fine examples of good blogging.  It is rare that Dr. Zero posts more than once per day, while American Thinker posts an average of seven articles per day.  Even Hot Air doesn't post an overwhelming number of articles per day.  I've been just as guilty as the next person of falling into this trap of quantity vs quality, and the stress often gets in the way of living a full and productive life.

If we intend to stay in this battle for the long haul, and mark my words, it will be a long and very hard haul, we need to stop screaming at each other.