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.
Tomorrow evening I will be picking up Dr. Kenton Sparks at the airport. He is the speaker for Taylor University College’s “Faith & Culture Conference” which runs Thursday and Friday of this week. The title of this year’s conference is “God’s Word in Human Words: The Prospects and Perils of Believing Criticism.”
What Kent will be drawing our attention to the human side of Scripture. And he is well-equipped to do such a task. He holds the PhD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he specialized in the study of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (his adviser was John Van Seters). His publications include numerous articles on the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, as well as four books:
Kent’s Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible is one of the best and most recent guides to all of the background literature to the Old Testament. It includes an introduction to comparative study of ANE texts and ANE archives and libraries, as well as a discussion of all of the relevant texts organized by genre. Original publication data and other useful bibliography is included for each ancient text — I highly recommend it. At present, Kent is preparing a book-length treatment of Israelite origins for Oxford University Press.