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Just a quick post to help me get back into the habit. See, I’ve been off for 5 days. In those 5 days, I haven’t created a single blog post, haven’t paid attention to my RSS subscriptions, and haven’t paid attention to twitter. Tomorrow I’ll be back, but I thought I’d take a look to see what I’ve missed while away. And you know what? I don’t think I’ve really missed anything.

I mean, I’m sure I’ve missed some news stories that would have been interesting to me. I’m sure there were items that I’d have passed around to friends or posted on. But looking back now, I don’t see a single thing that made me say “Damn, I wish I would have seen this and wrote about it.”

I think that a lot of people that see blogging as something more than just a hobby (and short of the people that do it for a living) suffer from fear of missing something. We see breaking stories as having a heightened sense of importance, as having the first coverage of a news stories has value.

And that brings me to my question of the day: how long does it take to become irrelevant? Seriously. How long does it take for a blog to lose all the readers the author has worked so hard to attract? If your blog is focused on being the source for breaking news and updates frequently, would your audience leave quickly due to the expectations you’ve set with them? What about if you avoid breaking news and instead focus on thought pieces or longer, more analytical posts?

Is relevance really based on the expectations you’ve set with your audience?

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