I never find status-update posts (”I’ll be away from this blog for a while”) particularly helpful, so I tend not to indulge in them myself. But at least I have some non-negligible number of readers who return to the blog on a regular basis and might conceivably wonder what happened to me. If I was a blogger with the grand total of one blog entry since May, why would I put up a post saying I was back? Conversely, if I was a blogger who had posted just two blog entries since June, why would I put up a post saying I was going away?

Of course, the great thing about blogs is that you can say whatever you like, no matter how banal. But at the same time, the great thing about RSS is that you don’t need those regular readers in order to get read: your subscribers will read you if and when you post something, and they’re quite likely to be the readers with their own blogs, who will link to you and get the news out that way. I have dozens if not hundreds of infrequently-updated blogs in my RSS reader, and I generally prefer them to the frequently-updated blogs: when something appears in them, there’s a good chance it’s pretty noteworthy. Unless, of course, it’s just a status update.