Lessons From Being Behind the Rest of the Blogosphere

For our regular readers you’ve likely grown accustom to a little feature I’ve called Today in Blogworld. I started this feature a long time ago in part to keep myself from hosting a rotting blog. I also love to put good material in front of people.

So every morning for the past few years I’ve scrolled through Feedly and bookmarked any article that even remotely looks interesting. Then when I go to write up the Today in Blogworld post I go back through the favorites and find four articles and a video from those saved lists. For the first few years the articles I shared were usually pretty fresh (1-2 days old). Now, my links aren’t all that fresh—in fact I’m about 10-12 days behind.

And I’m totally cool with that. I’ve learned a few things being so far “behind” the rest of the blogosphere. Here are a few things I’m learning.

1. What you find really significant today and you just have to write about, is likely going to be old news in about a week. Today as I sifted through the articles from a couple weeks ago a ton of them were about red cups. I won’t be linking to a single one because nobody really cares anymore. Some dudes are really good at this type of stuff, I’m not. While speaking to the outrage of the day is much needed, I’d rather write something that might still be relevant a year from now.

2. If you can pull yourself out of the echo chamber there really are some great pieces being written. Trying to keep up with the hot items of the day keeps you trapped in an echo chamber. This is why I confessed last year about this time that I was getting bored with blogs. I’m less bored now.

3. It’s giving some articles a longer shelf-life. On occasion I’ll notice that one of these older articles that I linked to gets picked up by other blog curators. I love adding shelf-life to good articles.

4. More and more articles are being written to sell books. I don’t know if I would have noticed this if I were doing my sifting in smaller, daily chunks as I had been. But I’m finding more and more that the whole purpose of writing an article is to sell a book. I find that interesting.

What does all of this mean? For me it simply reinforces what I’ve believed for awhile; namely, write for the eternal good of the audience God has given you.

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Photo source: here