When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone

I guess it depends upon what your motivation for blogging was when you began…

many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

[From When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone … – NYTimes.com]

For me, blogging is just a way to help myself remember interesting tidbits of information, possibly helping others do the same. If a magic genie appeared, and granted me a wish, suddenly growing an audience to become a full-time blogger would not be one of my requests1.

Ginseng

note: this entry never even got posted back in June, 2009. I’d hazard a guess that I had another thought on the topic, but got distracted before starting to type it out. Oh well.

Footnotes:
  1. working on a film, perhaps, and being a full-time highly paid art photographer would take precedence []

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