The Christianity Today blog uploaded a post yesterday entitled “The Death of Blogs” where Ted Olson muses on the demise of blogging in general and “God-blogging” in particular. He points to some recent research showing evidence of widespread “blog burnout.”
Here’s an excerpt:
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.
Which isn’t to say that blogging is dead. Quite the opposite. Blog aggregator Technorati estimates that 3 million new blogs are launched every month. The site’s tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Zillions of photos, videos, blogs, and more. Some of them have to be good.”
As someone who has struggled with blogging the last couple months (and no, I don’t plan on giving up on blogging), I can relate to those who throw in the towel. I think that Olson hits the nail on the proverbial head when he notes, “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.” Once my blog took off (and I thank all of my readers past and present), I felt this pressure to blog regularly so as not to disappoint my readers — and it was this perception of needing to blog that made it a chore rather than an enjoyable creative outlet and part of my teaching ministry.
I encourage you to read Olson’s whole post.
I wonder if a similar pressure is experienced by productive scholars, who after a series of publications in their area, and if they were well received, experience similar pressure from their academic community?
Hey Tyler… I hear what you are saying. My blog has a very small number of readers, but I also feel a little pressure to post on a regular basis and try and come up with something new or interesting to say. At the same time, I usually know it has been too long between posts because I actually miss it.
As a side note, one of my roommates works with Ted at Christianity Today so I am glad to hear that she and her co-workers are saying something that people are reading.
I hope blog fatigue will not remove your voice altogether from the blogsphere, the heady days of Early Blogginess I and II are over, but perhaps a more occasional desultory conversation… after all we read you on RSS so the frequency does not matter any more (much) if anything perhaps I prefer blogs that do not post too often… now I must follow my own wise advice and curb my anxiety when I have gone a week without a post 😉 and probably prune Jim from my blogroll, until I hear he has reformed and only posts 10 times an hour!