Blogs can become addictive for both readers and writers. Once you start to maintain a successful blog, you will find that it can be hard to walkaway from it. When the pressure from your community to continuously update builds to a level you can’t handle, you begin to suffer “Blogger Burnout”.
Wired.com has an article concerning “Blogger Burnout” and I recommend that you go read it. Effectively what it shows is how powerful a force a blog can become for the person who maintains it and the community that reads it.
Could you imagine a community being this passionate about a blog your company maintains? It’s possible. However, all the people mentioned in the article share a passion for writing on their blogs and therefore it is easy to see why they are so popular. I have written about passion and this article shows the negative effects of it.
If you are going to write daily on your blog over an extended period of time you have to understand that the readers of the site are going to expect writings daily. I am sure the majority of Kottke’s readers would like for him to write daily, but understand that this isn’t the case because his writing schedule has been more of an almost daily instead of consistently daily.
If your company decides to start a blog a key decision is how frequently you will write for it as this will dictate the mindset of your readers. Make sure that the individual or team that is going to maintain the blog is capable of keeping up with the schedule and that their passion for it does not die, because once it does the burnout sets in.
