Coming up at WCU

For some reason I'm really excited about tomorrow's post. I don't usually write very far ahead of time, but this one took a little bit of extra research. You see, I got this letter from a PR firm hyping some altmed doc, and it was much more interesting than the usual similar things I get. It highlights some of the subtleties at the intersection of science-based medicine and the other stuff.

The post is going up here tomorrow morning, and at Science-Based Medicine in the afternoon.

One thing I've found about blogging, though, is a piece I really work hard on and like a lot may go over like a real dud, and a post I crank out in five minutes may end up with more hits than I've seen in months. Go figure.

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That's how the blogosphere works; I had one post I spent probably fifteen hours completely devoted to, which only my subscribers really looked at. Then the little two paragraph blurb I wrote gets linked and cited on twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, and numerous other sites as if I said something revolutionary...

I don't know why this is, but it is a very interesting phenomenon. Perhaps some study could be done on this...

As a reader of 132 RSS feeds (from LOL cats to SB to XKCD to SBM) I can say with certainty that post length affects readership. Jared, your 15-hour post probably wasn't 2 paragraphs long, was it?

We live in an age of 140 character snippets, not Shakespeare.

Yeah, my post tomorrow approaches Oracian length.

I really like this current post. Let's get the hit rate up really high.

By the Blind Watchmaker (not verified) on 07 Mar 2010 #permalink

Advertising that tomorrow's post is especially good greatly increases the odds that I will read it :)