A Dying Blog?

Today my co-worker J. sent me an article from Christianity Today that re-enforced all of the feelings I've had about this blogging experiment recently. The article, entitled "The Death of Blogs," sums up so well the blog burnout I've been experiencing of late. Apparently blog burnout is a widespread problem, and one tech researcher reports that blogging has probably peaked.

When this little blog experiment began for me back in January, it was just that: a Saturday morning experiment. There is a lot of discussion in my industry about the usefulness of blogs: for promoting the publisher itself (and several major Christian publishers have started staff blogs in the last year), for promoting books, and for promoting authors. Curious about how this "blog thing" worked, I sat down on that quiet winter morning and decided I would find out just how hard it was to have a blog. And it was pretty easy--and fun. All at once, I was the writer, editor, and publisher of my own little media empire. And at first, it seemed like I had so many things to say.

And now, nine months later, there are days I feel like I have given birth to a monster. Sometimes it's easy to write, but more often than not, lately, it's a chore. Life has become busier since that first blog entry: I've accepted a major editing assignment for Reformed Fellowship that may never end, school and fall activities have started after a busy summer of activity, I'm trying to exercise, and I get my writing fix at work. And there are the technical difficulties of an Internet that never seems to work quite how you want it to when you want it to.

But, as the article points out, where it breaks down for us serious bloggers, is that balance between quality and quantity. We want to write well, things of substance, but this takes thought and time. But there are the pressures to post frequently as well. (I'm not sure from whom since this certainly isn't a paying proposition and there really is no blog supervisor to whom we report.) Just this week several people have pointed out that I haven't been posting as frequently. (I think this is some kind of psychological "blog weaning," because the article points out that people have a hard time letting their blogs go.) This is obvious if you check the number of postings for each month since I've begun. I'm no mathematician, but if you were to graph it, there would be a high place on the left in February with a steady, consistent decline with some slight variances to the right for the month of September.

All of this is to say that my blog is not dead yet, but it's definitely terminal. I'm hoping that it can last a year (that's my goal--I don't know why), because as sure as I shut it down, life will start getting interesting again; Katie will finally get that elusive license and start taking herself places, freeing up my time; and I won't get to write at work as much, so I'll need a blog for my writing fix.

All of this does raise some interesting questions about the psychology of blogging, and if there are any psychology PhD candidates looking for a thesis topic, here are some things to consider:

*Why do some bloggers, myself included, feel guilty for not posting more frequently?
*Why do we feel compelled to set deadlines for ourselves (like I'm going to do this for a year)?
*Why can't we just quit?
*Why do we ever start to begin with?
*Why do we care whether our postings are informative, creative, witty, and interesting--especially if we're just writing for ourselves?
*Why are we surprised when someone mentions that they've read our blog? After all, we're putting this information where it can be accessed 24/7 by anyone in the world. (Maybe this one is unique to me.)
*This one is for the audience: Why do we return, time and again, to the same blogs? Are they really that interesting? And why do we feel annoyed when there is no new posting, as if the blogger owes us something.

That should give someone a pretty good start on a doctoral thesis. And maybe, if that person needs more material, he or she could start a support group for burned-out bloggers. Or maybe, we could tie up our time starting a Google discussion group for bloggers, except that it would take away from our blog time, making us feel guilty for not blogging, and frustrating our audiences who have such high expectations...