In an interesting post earlier this month, Brett Bonfield at ACRLog is worried that his favorite bloggers might post more often:

I’ve noticed that several of my favorite writers have resolved to post more frequently in 2008. Dear favorite writers: at the risk of sounding ungrateful, would you be terribly offended if I begged you not to follow through on this resolution?

It’s not that he’s worried about having too much to read. Instead, he is concerned that his favorite blogs will lose focus, and be less worthwhile than they are now because of it.

I left a comment on that post at the time, but I have been thinking about it some more since.

I agree that posting more just for the sake of posting more can easily lead to a noisy blog. If those “additional” posts are just the proverbial cat photos, or brief comments on things I have already seen linked elsewhere, it’s going to get very noisy very fast. If it is all your del.icio.us links or your twitter feed, chances are I have already unsubscribed.

But as I read Bonfield’s post, I was interested to see that his reasons for reading a blog don’t quite jibe with mine. In particular, he says of bloggers that he likes:

You publish almost nothing that’s off-topic, in particular almost nothing that’s both off-topic and solely about you. Once or twice a year, at most, going off-topic or writing about yourself is actually endearing. And it can be useful in our post-postmodern world if you acknowledge personal reasons for your opinions. But I’m reading your writing in order to learn about the topic of your blog. Abandon that topic too often and I’ll mostly likely unsubscribe from your feed.

In my case, I’m not necessarily interested in blogs that are tightly focused and always on topic. I’m more interested in following the blogger where he or she may go. I was going to call this “voice,” as I like writers with an identifiable style. In my comment on the ACRLog post, I used Walt Crawford and Dorothea Salo (who, as I write, has a cat photo as her current post) as examples; in those two cases (along with several others I could mention) I came to identify with the writer’s voice, which then led me to care about the person behind the voice.

But this quality that makes me want to follow a blog comes across strongly even in what just amounts to a linkstream. Andy Baio’s Waxy.org links is one of my don’t-miss blogs, and it’s just a list of links with minimal commentary. keyvowel’s del.icio.us linkstream is similar. The key to both of those “blogs” isn’t writing, it is the fact that those two people have interests that are similar enough to mine, but they also read more widely and hang out in different parts of the web than I do, so their links tend to be new to me.

So it’s not just voice that makes me stick with a blog. It has something to do with signal-to-noise ratio, and something to do with the flâneur’s ability to make the act of just wandering around noticing things into a work of art. (Has anyone written about “blogger as flâneur” yet? If not, it’s my ticket to getting published in some cultural studies journal.)

This quality that keeps me reading a blog–I’m going to call it “sensibility” instead of “voice.” If you have a better word for it, let me know.

If someone has a sensibility that I find fascinating or sympathetic or usefully irritating, I’d love for them to blog more, assuming that they can keep that sensibility honed. The occasional cat photo or link to something on BoingBoing is fine, but if I’m subscribed to your blog, I’m mostly interested in you and the kind of thing that only you would write, or that no one else I follow would point out on the web. As long as you stay attuned to that sensibility, you can’t go off topic.