Life and Death in the blogsphere

Over the past month a number of authors of established blogs have decided to give up blogging, while a number of new blogs have sprung up out of cyberspace. While Xavier of About Town has decided to give it a break, I do hope he springs up again on another blog sometime in the future.

While I recognise blogs with a daily posting frequency do get read more widely and more often, I do wonder about how sustainable this is. Over a year a great number of things in a person's life can change, most notably the time spent in wage slavery employment, that can adversely affect the amount of time a person has to research and blog. Of course there are some very notable and worthy exceptions, such as DPF and No Right Turn, who have managed to post frequently without blogburnout.

Blogs are very similar to other publications such as newspapers and magazines - a great many start in a blaze of enthusiasm, only to run out of puff after a few editions. On starting this blog just over a year ago, I aimed to post two or three times a week - an average I have, by and large, been able to maintain.

I see little point in a blog that just parrots other blogs or the general media. Many of my postings are things I have been mulling about for a couple of days. IMHO the modern media too often falls into the trap of simply reporting a constant stream of 'facts' as they appear at the time, without analysis or contemplation, when such activity is often the key means of identifying the meaning and purpose of current events.

For me, blogging is a hobby that fits in well with my other interests. I find blogging a useful way to collect my thoughts on a particular issue, and speaking more personally, I use it as a means to fight an inbuilt perfectionism, a character flaw that makes it hard for me to write anything, even when I really want to. I sometimes use my blog like a public sketchpad - a couple of my entries I have extended into longer articles that have been published elsewhere.

So despite recent incidences of linkdeath elsewhere in the blogsphere, this blog is set to continue.