My attempt to put up a web presence is negated by the fact that I don't make many trivial updates or statements; as a result, I'm less concerned with the immediate payoff of these sorts of writings and more about making a longer statement. My friend and colleague Cosma Shalizi pointed out to me when I started this site that there are two steady states for successful blogs:
- those that are fast to update, have lots of constant yet ephemeral traffic, and have their spam problems mitigated by a quality comment model, and
- those that are infrequently updated, have occasional yet consistent traffic, and have their spam problems eliminated by removing the ability to comment.