Quantity vs. quality in blogging

Felix Salmon, one of my favorite bloggers, has posted some notes on blogging which are well worth reading in full for anyone interested in blogging.

I noticed in particular some advice which runs somewhat counter to my last change of direction on People and Resources (a commitment to "spend more time on fewer posts and use that time to provide more value-added original commentary"):

As always, there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently.

Often bloggers are the worst judges of their own work; I can give you hundreds of personal examples of blog entries I thought were really good which disappeared all but unnoticed, and of blog entries I thought were tossed-off throwaways which got enormous traction and distribution.

"Bloggers are the worst judges of their own work" rings particularly true to me (especially given the feedback I've received thus far).

A commenter adds a very interesting quote:

The quantity over quality spiel reminds me of the art and fear quote about potmaking:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Effort expended attempting to produce high quality works is not the same as actually producing high quality work.

So... I guess the pendulum should swing the other way and I will be looking for that happy medium...