Essay: The Perceived Freshness Fetish

On: June 22, 2007
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About Anne Helmond
Anne Helmond is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture and Program Director of the MA New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Digital Methods Initiative research collective where she focuses her research on the infrastructure of social media platforms and apps. Her research interests include digital methods, software studies, platform studies, app studies, infrastructure studies and web history.

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Why do I feel a need to blog daily? There seems to be some kind of consensus or norm in the blogosphere that blogs should be updated daily. Several blogs about blogging recommend posting daily and blog search engine Technorati’s rankings are correlated to a blog its freshness. There is both an internal and an external “perceived freshness fetish” (Rogers, 2007) in the blogosphere. The internal freshness fetish could be described as a wish, a personal demand or a wanting to blog daily. The external freshness fetish could be described as a requirement by external parties like Google and Technorati to blog daily to achieve a certain ranking. This external freshness fetish is further imposed by using ping techniques to let services such as Technorati know that you have updated your blog.

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