[M]any 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.
From When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone … , a brief New York Times article on the subject.
You know… and I know you know… sometimes you’ve just got to step away from it to be able to figure out if you want to do it or if it’s just become a chore.
I’m back to it (we’ll see how long it lasts this time) but am ambivalent about my commitment. I know that blogging is an indicator of how I feel about how my life is going.
It hadn’t been going so well for a while and the absences show it.
Eh.
I’m not sure blogging — or any particular blog — should be seen as permanent. A writer doesn’t work on a novel forever, for example.
Over the life span of Functional/Ambivalent it was really several blogs. That may have been just fine from my point of view, but it was also one of the reasons it didn’t succeed as a commercial product. It turned over audiences every couple of years as the blog drifted away from what had drawn people to it.
I think a lot of bloggers check out because blogging is hard. Writing every day is a chore, no matter how self-indulgent that writing may be. (Writing is also something everyone thinks they can do, and blogging has taught a lot of people that they can’t in fact, write.) I have a lot of friends who blogged for about three weeks and then stopped.
But I also think that a lot of blogs pass because they’ve served their creative or personal purpose. Perhaps if people didn’t assume that blogging was somehow supposed to be forever this would be different. Perhaps if people thought of a particular blog as something they were going to do for a set period of time — a summer vacation, for example — before moving on to other creative endeavors, the ending of a blog would not be assumed to be some kind of failure.
I used to make this argument back when I was in the TV business, that we needed to experiment with a type of series somewhere between a miniseries (3-5 episodes) and a series (running until people lose interest.) I proposed a couple of 20 episode series, but the argument was that if it was popular, why would you stop?
My answer was always that you’d stop because it was time to stop, the story had run its course. I think some blogs are like that. F/A was like that. It was, personally, very valuable. Judging from my email since the shut-down, readers found it valuable. But it was still time for it to stop. That’s not a diminution of its value; I think it’s a preservation of its value.
A lot of blogs are like that. Their endings aren’t a matter of burn-out; they’re a matter of creative movement in a new direction, and in the case of blogging that movement might require an entirely new platform.