That is the question……
Whilst you can find yourself asking that question before any post, especially if you’re about to give another blogger a good shoeing, I’ve found myself asking it just recently every time a ‘hot topic’ comes up.
DealDotCom, Blogrush, WordPress 2.3 are all very popular right now, yet for every five posts about one of those subjects, I’m seeing another castigating people for writing about it, saying they’re sick to death of hearing about X, Y or Z and why can’t people be more original? I can understand this view to a point, as especially if you use a Feed Reader, it can be a little wearing the day after a big launch to click on each blog and see a post about the same subject, but what’s the answer?
Are we expected to leave posts about the big topics just to the big bloggers?
Someone else has written about something, so you should never blog about it in future?
If you haven’t got anything original to write, don’t post at all?
Hardly fair is it? I have always been of the opinion that you should write about whatever you like, how you like, and that there’s enough readers to go around for all. In my opinion, it’s how the post is written, not what the subject is that’s the most important factor, so just because 500 other bloggers have written about something, doesn’t mean to say you can’t. For another reason, we all move in different circles and if your circle of readers haven’t read about a subject elsewhere, they’ll be grateful to you for bringing it to their attention.
It’s easy to accuse bloggers of being copy-cats, and to be fair that’s true in a lot of cases, but if a subject is hot now, there’s no point saving up your post for 3 months time, and if you’ve ever read more than one newspaper on any given day, you’ll see that it’s not just bloggers who all write about the same stuff.
I haven’t written about DealDotCom, because I’m really not interested in it. I haven’t gone to WP 2.3 yet, as I’m waiting for the inevitable security patch, so I’m not going to post about that right now. I did write about Blogrush simply because I signed up to it after reading Andy Beard’s post about it at a time when I hadn’t seen it written about anywhere else, and for a few short hours my post was fairly original.
My point, if there is one, is that you shouldn’t be put off writing about something, just because others already have. To my mind, posts that moan about people being unoriginal are far more boring than someone merely writing about a popular topic.
Hmm, have I just written a post moaning about the moaning posts?
8 users commented in " To Post Or Not To Post? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYes, you have, but that’s okay.
It’s rare to write about a hot topic and not have hundreds of other people writing about the same thing. The ones that complain, well, they’ll get over it.
If you’re afraid that somebody has already written about it you can just as well stop blogging completely since that’s always going to be the case. Unless you’re immediately at the source of things, it’s been written about.
So don’t be afraid to write about something if someone else might already have done so, you can’t go around it.
Chris, these are some great and valid points. When something big is happening and there’s a groundswell or a big meme-burst, everyone is affected and everyone is thinking about it. So of course we post about it. I had a slew of BlogRush posts.
I’m normally not one to go jumping on bandwagons and echoing the same news as everyone else, but BlogRush was big news and I had some things to say about it I didn’t hear anyone else saying.
Great post, Chris!
sometimes, you have to write about a hot topic. It depends on your readers actually. My readers are not really updated to these kind of stuff so when I write about these, I reach out to them.
Is there any topic — no matter how obscure — that isn’t written about by 500 bloggers somewhere?
With 55 million or so blogging I rather doubt it.
Post about whatever you want, please !
I’m glad it’s not just me then
I’ve just seen so many negative posts recently complaining about people writing about hot topics, that it really got under my collar.
[...] was catching up on some reading over at Blog-Op the other day when I came across a post titled To Post Or Not To Post (am I allowed to use the word “post” so many times in one sentence?). In it Chris poses [...]
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