Bloggers and Spammers work 9 to 5 now

Back in the "good old days", when the web was a frontier town, and we all did it for the hell of it, everyone worked or played at it all hours.

Today the web has become, for better or worse, "professionalised". Bloggers and spammers work office hours, and probably in an office as well. None of this working from home, with a beer or a coffee by your side. None of this jeans and a sweater, they even wear suits these days.

This WebMasterWorld thread explores when to, and when not to, post on the web if you want anyone to actually read your rubbish.

According to worldtime.com, it is 6:40am in San Francisco at the time I start this message. Why is that important? Because it means that a majority of the hardcore internet professionals on this planet are either showering right now, or already struck in traffic jams. In other words, they are logged out right now.

And the guy is right. The professionals that hog the mainstream of the web do not work weekends, certainly do not work nights, and are spread around the globe. I am in Europe, but things are fairly quiet until New York wakes up arund lunch time here, and things do not really buzz until the West Coast wakes up some hours later

Over at ThreadWatch Nick Wilson makes the point

Monday: Lots of people online, but not much posting
Tuesday: Less than monday, but more posting
Wednesday: Things start to heat up - lots of posting and reading
Thursday: Hottest day of the week for new posts and discussions
Friday: All hands on deck! Drunk posts alert!

and goes on to say

RSS and Timing

If you post a lot, as we do here - typically 10+ items a day on the main RSS feed then you need to really get your timing right for the important posts.

Quite often i have to jig the date on a particularly good post that just got posted at the wrong time and bump it up on the RSS so it looks fresh (rss spamming? heh..)

There is definately an art and a science to timing with RSS and forums type posts in general - particulary if you want a great discussion - gotta check the hourly logs and work out when the "critical mass" times are..

So there you have it, a window for those important posts open for 4 or 5 hours a day from Monday to Thursday. In Europe it's from late afternoon to early evening.

The spammers, the movers and shakers and even the poor sods that lap the stuff up are elsewhere at other times. Heaven help us, I have even stopped getting many spam emails over the weekend.

Me? I still live on the old frontier. The boundary between work and play is blurred. It's 7 pm on a Sunday night - time to knock off and go out for a meal with my wife. But depending on my inclination , may or may not return to the computer afterwards.