It's all RSS' fault.

Instead of apologizing for not posting in way too long, I thought I'd take a closer look at why. It may actually be illuminating. (Well, that's the goal, anyway.)

I had planned to post once or twice a week on here, but other things--lack of a coherent focus on the blog, lack of motivation, lack of readers, a much busier life in general--have kept me from doing that for most of this blog's life. But now I haven't posted since June 14, the longest drought since I started this blog.

When I started thinking about why I haven't posted so long, I realized the reason went back to a change in the way I read blogs. Namely, I stopped posting because I started using RSS.

I actually started using RSS--through Google Reader--late this spring. For the uninitiated, RSS provides a simple way to get all of the new posts from the sites you regularly visit sent to one place. The idea is that instead of visiting bunches of blogs to see if they've posted since you were last there, you can open your RSS feed and get all of the new updates in one window.

RSS is incredibly convenient--it saves you a lot of browsing time, while you still get all the information you were looking for. But it's also an incredibly passive experience--instead of having to go to the web, the web comes to you. I don't have to have the presence of mind and curiosity to go, "Hmm, I wonder if my friend MattO has written anything lately," because as soon as MattO posts anything, my RSS feed will tell me. Again, it saves a lot of time, but I lose a lot of the serendipity of spontaneous discovery, too.

So once I started using RSS, I also started unconsciously assuming (stupidly) that everyone else must read my blog through RSS, too. In other words, they don't need to wander over here to find out if I've posted anything, because their feed will let them know. A long break between posts is no big deal for them, since they'll know when the break ends, and it won't cost them any effort. But for readers who don't have RSS, of course, my gap between posts is going to lead them to stop coming here, since they're not rewarded for their effort with any new content.

So consider this my apology to those without RSS (shoot, I ended up apologizing anyway), and my lament that though RSS has added quite a bit of convenience to my web experience, it's also taken away a lot of spontaneity in browsing and my urgency in posting. And those are qualities worth lamenting.