I Know Jeffrey Smith Will Be Glad to Hear This ...
... from Christianity Today:
The Death of BlogsMy Comments:
Well, some of them, anyway.
As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol's famous aphorism was modified to read, "In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people." Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.
Tech researcher Gartner Inc. reported earlier this year that 200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active.
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer told reporters. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Given the average lifespan of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, Gartner says blogging has probably peaked.
***
Actually, some Christian blogs are very good. What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering, however, is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency.
As conservative political blogger Glenn Reynolds told Wired News in 2004, "I know that if I go more than about five or six hours without posting or telling people that I'm not going to be blogging for the rest of the day, [I'll get worried messages asking,] 'You haven't posted anything in five or six hours. Are you okay?'"
"Good bloggers work like dogs," says Michael Parsons, editor of the tech site CNet.co.uk. "You can't expect readers to show up unless you show up. And the Internet never closes. … Every successful blogger I've come across is the same. Eat, sleep, and drink the work. No time out; no holidays."
That's not a recipe for healthy living, especially if you're working a day job that's not paying you to blog. When Catholic blogger Amy Welborn shut down Open Book in August to focus on writing books, she wrote: "I want to do good, and I want to do lasting good — the kind of good that people carry around, share, put on their bookshelves and reflect on — rather than the kind of good that sparks a momentary flash until we surf to the next website and the next and the next."
[More]
Folks, the moment it stops being a hobby and/or being fun, it's time to quit.
As I approach my 40th birthday this weekend, I sometimes wonder how far away I am from reaching that point.
Labels: Blogging
posted by Pro Ecclesia 3:36 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Happy soon to be Birthday, is the wife going to decorate the lawn with "Lordy Lordy Jay is 40!" pink flamingo's?
I quite blogging the easiest way, I never started!
Happy B-Day! Your only about a year ahead of me. Let me know how it goes. :)
Here is the killer quote from the article.
"Every successful blogger I've come across is the same. Eat, sleep, and drink the work. No time out; no holidays."
That sounds like...obsession.
If that is what people are doing, when do they have time for the important stuff? I guess I'll remain obscure.
I am actually not a big fan of the guys who put up 20-30 posts a day. It's a little hard to keep track of. Frankly, I prefer blogs like this that have 5-6 posts a day, even less. I don't need to get a blogger's opinion on every single thing that happens in the course of a day.
Post a Comment
<< Home