What is the minimum bloggable contribution?

The other day someone sent me an email pointing me to an online article, a statistical analysis criticizing an online article that was a reanalysis of data from an article that was a meta-analysis and literature review of a controversial topic that had been written about in some earlier published papers that were themselves literature reviews.

My correspondent was interested in my take, and I replied that the latest article made some good points and also some errors. I didn’t think I had anything useful to say on this one so I didn’t post on the topic.

Given that I’d already gone to the trouble of reading–OK, skimming–all these articles, and I can post here for free, arguably I could contribute in a useful way just with a short post explaining where I agreed with this new article and where I thought it went wrong. I have no real or perceived beefs with any of the people involved in this one, and I expect that whatever feedback I were to provide would be taken constructively, not defensively.

So why not post? The difficulty here would come not directly in my comments on those articles but rather in the necessary scaffolding: all the bits I’d need to add to avoid writing something that could be misinterpreted.

One of the challenges of writing, as compared to speaking, is that your words are just out there, interpreted without the benefit of intonation, context, and dialogue. This isn’t anything specific to blogging; the same issue can arise when communicating with people by email. Not that direct face-to-face conversation works either; it’s just that something written is just out there in some way.

So it’s a cost-benefit calculation: weighing my contributions to this particular discussion against the effort of constructing the scaffolding. In this case I decided the best option was to not bother.

But then I became interested in the meta-topic of when to post, so I wrote this, which I’ll schedule to appear in a few months.