Blog Fatigue

I don’t have it, but my ailment shares a lot in common with blog fatigue.

August was littered with some major bloggers ruminating on why they haven’t blogged or why blogging doesn’t feel the same. The timing of this isn’t unexpected. Despite the Internet being 24/7, the blogosphere does seem to have seasons. The Blog seasons can be seen by informally comparing the Technorati charts showing the number of new blogs and blog posts. Other than some special start-of-semester events—like Hurricane Katrina—August (when academic semesters are gearing up) and December (when people are busy with holidays) are the low-tide periods for the year.

Technorati’s April 2007 report on the Live Web shows some dips in August

According to Kent Newsome, bloggers have a life cycle, too. Not everyone follows this process of development along the same time frame, nor does this framework really address the ebbs and flows of active bloggers, but a list that might seem familiar to short-term bloggers:

1. Excitement—There is an entire process that precedes this first stage of blogging, dealing with the decision to publish in the first place. Once that decision is made, though, the new blogger is busy testing platforms, configuring themes, and getting ready to say Hello to the world. The writing process starts out fuzzy and ideal, propped up by all of the topic ideas that went into the decision to blog in the first place.
2. Expectation—This is the learning stage, where the blogger figures out some of the bigger obstacles to consistent publication and explores the terms and resources in the larger blogosphere. Statistics are important here, particularly with a prime motivation being readership. When readership is low, every new reference to your work is cause for celebration. Lofty goals may be set in this stage.
3. Frustration—Inevitably, the realization dawns that few people become A-list bloggers with money-making communities. The ROI on writing doesn’t have the same payoffs, and perhaps for the first time the enormity of sustaining a blog for a long period sinks in.

   This is where Newsome’s framework falls short by assuming decline is inevitable. While statistics may not improve quickly, if at all, there are other motiviations for blogging that can help work through the frustration of dashed hopes for notoriety. Readers are great, community conversation is enlightening, but in the end writers write because it becomes a way of expressing ideas for themselves. In short, there are other paths to a sustainable blog than blogrolls.

4. Alienation—For the dying blog, the function and tone of the site changes. The blogger can’t stop cold because too much investment is in the project, but the motivation to form cohesive sentences without being angry or depressed rants is waning.
5. Abandonment—Some blogs give a sense of closure with a farewell. Others just drop the site like a sack of unwanted kittens on a highway. If this doesn’t sour the blogger on the entire medium, it at least forces some down time in World of Warcraft of the local coffee shack before trying again.

Analysis of blogging shows that 3 in 5 blogs are abandoned—quickly—which is probably a credit to a lower barrier to entry. Unfortunately, it also serves to paint extreme boom and doom pictures of the medium. Very little attention has been paid to the notion that today’s A-list bloggers will one day be replaced, that there is a new tech-generation of active bloggers who will gain prominence just through the habitual practice of publishing and the inevitable ebbing of individual relevance.

Perhaps we could examine the dynamics of other media. Traditional newspapers have a much higher barrier to entry: high costs of newsprint and investigative coverage of a geographic area or domain of interest. Also, newspapers rarely are a one-person shop, which means they benefit from group dynamics and responsibilities. With those things factored in, I suspect the abandonment picture isn’t very different from blogging. The metrics, therefore, should be less about counting new blogs and more about detecting the dynamics of active blogging.

Web Worker Daily offered some great advice for re-organizing your blogging process to become more productive. That isn’t my problem. Part of my web surfing practice is to evaluate new information in the context of a possible blog. I use IMified to create quick drafts of future posts, sometimes just a reminder link, and frequently re-open those drafts to stick in more information as it comes in. There is no shortage of writing ideas, just a shortage of time to write.

Complicating matters is that my exposure to the wave of new information is considerably higher, thanks to Google Reader. The IU School of Informatics is finally integrating blogging into coursework, as well, with three courses of students being compelled to participate as authors and commentators. Surprisingly (to me), it is exceeding my attention threshold to read everything in-depth, let alone participate in important conversations. With grad classes and student activism consuming my days, and academic reading claiming my nights, it is difficult to squeeze in time for my blog to-do queue. After I hit publish on this post, the list currently sits at 106 draft ideas, some a year old. Even if I could stop the world from producing new information, just processing my drafts queue will take to Christmas before I need a new idea.

For me, the fatigue isn’t with the blog but with the rest of the important things in my life that don’t afford the time to post.

Building a community is an important activity to help push through the frustration phase into a higher level of expectation. I look at it not as an end goal but as a buffer against inactivity: The more people paying attention, the more hooks to stay engaged. It helps, too, to reinvent your blog—visually—from time to time. With BlogSchmog, I missed my own August deadline to give the site a face lift (and in the process change the configuration a bit to better help promote our work). At some point, it might become vital to invest the time to read Nick Carroll’s Law of the Blog about the legal aspects of this medium. All that seems terribly formal and heavy, though, to the point of mutating the motivation to blog into something unnatural.

It is nice to see some incentives being put into the world to encourage a stronger commitment to the medium. I’m sure this site doesn’t have the content or audience to claim those kinds of prizes, which means the lion’s share of the motivation remains intrinsic. First and foremost, BlogSchmog serves as an academic and family archive for the Makices, the primary consumers of this site. We love the idea of people sharing our lives and our ideas, but we are motivated to write as a way of processing the bits and pieces going through our lives.

Whew.