A question on blogging

I enjoyed reading Miles Kimball’s reflectionson 4 years of blogging. I’ve been going only 6 months longer, so we both came to blogging at a similar time. We have a similar number of twitter followers, if that means anything. We readeach other out of interest rather than obligation, and not because we agree about everything.

Given all that, I was interested in this paragraph of his:

"Some days I have something I am dying to say. Other days, I think “I need to stay in the game by blogging regularly so that when I do have something I am dying to say, there will be readers there to hear it.” That is, I try to be dependable for my readers so that they will be there when I have an idea I really want to get out there. (According to the rules I have made up for myself, being dependable for my readers includes (a) havingsomething new every day, even if it is just a link, (b) having a Sunday post on either religion or a key text like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (c ) at least two other posts with some meat to them each week and (d) having the blog be visually appealing with several pictures every week to break up the words. Living up to that has not always been easy.)"

Now I know I generally fail on (d), and I could not do (b). But I’m also very self-indulgent about when I blog. The only rules I have is that I always try to wait at least a day between first writing and then publishing, and that I try and avoid publishing two on the same day, but otherwise I write when I think I have something to say. It was a complete surprise to me that this meant I blogged fairly regularly: when I started I imagined there would be periods of a week or more when I had nothing to write about.

When I did start a number of people said that I should consider joining forces with others, so as to enable regular publication. There are some good examples of that out there, but I felt the premise was wrong. Why should a blog appear regularly? Mine happens to be, except on a few occasions that I’m immersed in something else that takes all my time. But is that any kind of virtue? It is of no interest to me in the blogs that I read, perhaps because I’m invariably reading them with a lag.

So this is my question. Is there any virtue in blogging regularly? I know the legendary Paul Krugman used to forewarn his readers that he might not be writing anything for a few days, but would they really go away if they hadn’t been forewarned? I would be very interested with thoughts via comments or twitter.