Do Bloggers Have A Contract With Their Readers?

As bloggers we want people to read what we write. And because of the personal nature of the medium of blogging, we owe some certain obligations to our readers.

I was reading through my feeds earlier, when I came across two political posts from a social media blog. I don't particularly care what the blogger's political opinions are, I read the blog for the excellent social media content. I don't really want political opinion in that reader, as it's just clutter when I'm researching and learning about the social and semantic web.

I'm not going to mention the blog here, because while I am complaining about it, it is an excellent blog, and I don't want to complain about it by name. Especially when there are many blogs doing this very thing, and there is no reason to single this blog out, other than the subject was on my mind and I hit the posts in question, so it made a good example for what I'm thinking here.

People read blogs for specific reasons. They read humor blogs to be entertained, have a fun time and a laugh or two. The read Search Engine blogs to keep up with new trends and techniques in obtaining good listings in the SERPs. They read blogging blogs to learn better blogging skills and tips and tricks for improving their blog space. They read Social media blogs to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of social networking, and obtain best practice advice and information for making a good presentation for themselves well those networks.

Because blogging is a personal medium, and blogs are a personal publishing system, there is some flex available to inject the occasional bit of personal information into the blog.

Anyone who really enjoys a certain blog will be happy to read the occasional post about having a baby, getting married, lose teeth and even traffic frustration or project disappointment.

There are limits to these allowances, however. If your humor blog suddenly starts filling up with make money on line posts, you are going to drive your readers away. If you start posting soup recipes to your tech gadgets blog, you are going to bore your readers to tears.

If you start posting about politics or religion on any blog that isn't about those things, you run an even bigger risk. You annoy those who have no interest in those things, and you alienate those who disagree with your particular stance. Both of these results are detrimental to your blog's health.

We are operating under an unwritten contract with our readers. We all know how it is. Our feed readers and email boxes are too full as it is. So we rigorously filter them. As bloggers we have an obligation to our readers not to start dumping unrelated content into their feed readers and inboxes.

It's not fair to them. They've bookmarked us for the content we write that is in keeping with the topic our blogs are about. They subscribe to us for that specific content. We owe it to them not to start pushing out messages about things they aren't interested in.

What makes this even worse is that we have many venues for expressing ourselves on these other topics in places where people do want to read them. You can post to a forum that covers the off topic writing. You could offer your articles as guest posts to a friend with a blog on the foreign topics.

Hell, you could even start another, appropriate blog if you really have a passion about the topic. Even do a quick, "I have a new blog about ____________" post to let readers who are interested know that they can red about it there.

What do you say? is there a contract, or obligation to our readers? If not, where have I gone wrong? Do you post off topic frequently? Do you stay on message at all times? I'd love to read your thoughts.