Funny thing. Just yesterday, I reiterated my old blogging maxim:

On those rare occasions where someone’s asked me what it takes to build a highly-trafficked blog, the one thing I’ve advocated above everything else — more than even content focus — is frequency of publication. The way I frame it: If you’re looking to gain an audience, you have to accept that you’re no longer blogging on your schedule, but rather on your readers’ schedule. (emphasis added)

Then, today, I was pointed to Eric Kintz’s list of points about how publishing frequency is irrelevant, even detrimental, for blogs.

Kintz’s chief arguments are that too-frequent posting (i.e., multiple posts per day) amounts to information overload for regular readers, cluttering up their RSS aggregators and thereby turning them off. A corollary reason is that quantity comes at the expense of quality: A bunch of half-baked snippets versus one time-culled gem of insight.

As someone who’s only consistent blogging theme here is, indeed, daily and frequent posting, I take a skeptical view on this. I expressed as much in a comment:

For me, it’s worth blogging daily doses of singles and doubles (and foul balls, of course), with the payoff being an occasional home run. That’s my rhythm, and I come to it via a lifetime of writing. Naturally, others not as comfortable with the written word might not prefer that rigor…

Note that [an established regular publishing schedule] doesn’t necessarily mean frequent posting, or even daily posting. But it does mean that you should decide on an update schedule, and stick to it. If you start out posting two times a week, or five time a week, or two times a day, then your audience should expect that’s what’s coming their way. Unpredictability turns readers off.

In a way, limiting post frequency is a nod toward publishing on your audience’s schedule, but in almost the reversal of the concept I was getting across originally. Let’s face it: The typical blog suffers not from an overload of posting, but from a pathetic lack of it; it’s not uncommon to see casual bloggers take weeks-long unannounced breaks (and then whine about how no one’s reading). Frankly, I didn’t think the chronic writers in the blogosphere needed to curb their output as a way to succeed.

At best, the less-is-more approach works if you’re maintaining a niche site that has a targeted and recognizable audience, and drawing in new readers via search engines isn’t a priority. And — this is crucial — the blog is past the start-up phase. I think a critical mass of archived posts is essential, which is why you almost have to earn that wind-down frequency after a rather torrid start (an approach advocated by Performancing, incidentally).

But if your aim is to cultivate bigger traffic numbers, the more content you crank out, the better. Like it or not, Google and other aggregators give more love to frequently-updated sites, and the audiences they funnel can’t be easily replaced by other means. New posts are as good as gold in that regard.