A sort of stupid article appeared on page 1 on the New York Times Sunday Styles section today titled: “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest.” The essential mistake was when they compared “blog failures” ie abandoned blogs to closings of restaurants. Why is that stupid?
Restaurants are primarily businesses that take a cash investment. Closure generally means failure in a significant way.
Blog are primarily creative expressions that take no cash and virtually no effort. Many are created by a person as a type of diary to express something which, once expressed, can be retired successfully. I know loads of “divorce blogs” where people used it as cathartic way to express themselves during a difficult time. When the time was over, they stopped.
The intelligent or meaningful comparisons of abandoned blogs might be to efforts to write a script, exercise regimes, or books started to read.
Now the article does include the important point that some blogs are started with commercial ambitions which often, like many startups, don’t succeed. And like many exercise plans or diets, a blog commitment is not forever. But the article failed to actually explore the types of blogs, the purpose of blogs, and which of these tend to be disappointments, and which tend to succeed. Of course, the article really annoyed me because there was no way to comment on it directly. Although I am a lifetime NYT reader and subscriber (currently on the weekend plan), the combination of no comics and no ability to discuss articles online is slowly killing my enthusiasm for it. Also, some bad articles. I sure wish they would get their act together. Is it that hard?
Here’s part of the article:
“HI, I’m Judy Nichols. Welcome to my rant.”
Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”
The post generated no comments.
Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.
Like Mrs. Nichols, many 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.
Thus was born Rantings of a Crazed Soccer Mom, the blog of a stay-at-home mother and murder-mystery writer from Wilmington, N.C. Mrs. Nichols, 52, put up her first post in late 2004, serving up a litany of gripes about the Bush administration and people who thought they had “a monopoly on morality.” After urging her readers to vote for John Kerry, she closed with a flourish: “Practice compassionate regime change.”
The post generated no comments.
Today, Mrs. Nichols speaks about her blog as if it were a diet or half-finished novel. “I’m going to get back to it,” she swears. Her last entry, in December of last year, was curt and none too profound. “Books make great gifts,” she began, breaking a silence of nearly a month.
Like Mrs. Nichols, many 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.
