LOTS of people are blogging nowadays, but not everyone is able to consistently update their blogs.
Sometimes it’s a case of ningas cogon, where we’re all fired up when we start blogging for the first time, but then lose interest or can’t find the time to add new entries. Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and before you know it, your blog has joined the growing ranks of the dead and dormant.
As a disclaimer, I have to admit I haven’t been able to update my personal blog for almost two months, though I hope to start blogging there again pretty soon, otherwise people might think I no longer have a life outside INQUIRER.net, heh. I’m not making excuses, but in my defense I’ve been building the INQUIRER.net Blogs network, among other things, as our company’s gaming and multimedia editor.
I had an interesting conversation this afternoon with fellow Blog Addicts team member, b5media.com technology channel editor and INQUIRER.net interactive media consultant Jayvee Fernandez, after we finished recording another episode of hackenslash: the podcast. He said it’s actually a challenge to update your personal blog once you start maintaining several blogs, particularly if you become a pro blogger.
If you’re writing for several blogs, and presumably talking about your different interests (after all, usually we blog about stuff we know best), then at some point you might have to decide what you’re going to post on your own blog, and what you’ll reserve for your other “work-related” blogs. Sometimes you need to learn to “compartmentalize” different aspects of your life, to use Jayvee’s term.
I’m relieved to hear that a seasoned blogger like Jayvee also finds this challenging, heh; I feel a lot better now, and resolve to start taking care of my personal blog again. It’s a balancing act, particularly since I’m also a tech blogger for Singapore-based CNET Asia.
Which is why it’s not surprising that the number of active blogs is much fewer than the actual number of blogs out there.
Here’s an excerpt from the blog entry “Active Blogging Flat At 15.5 Million Blogs” by David Utter:
A lot of bloggers have discovered what writers have known for quite a while. Writing requires effort. Anyone who thinks mercenaries care a lot about money hasn’t met a professional writer. It’s the carrot to the deadline stick.
Heather Green’s look at Technorati’s numbers on blogging isn’t real surprising. Although the number of blogs continues to rise, David Sifry’s State of the Live Web shows a relative flatline in active blogging.
Green cited Gartner analyst Adam Sarner on why this is really a good thing:
Sarner argues that, since the audience reading blogs continues to grow, this classic tech cycle of hype and maturity is good news for the remaining blogs. Those left standing are the influencers that attract audiences and advertisers.
Blogging has been around for a few years, and advice abounds on the Internet on how to blog well. Someone who’s firing up Wordpress or Movable Type for the first time, for whatever reason, should take away this lesson: blog fame isn’t a sprint, but a marathon. Not everyone is in shape to run one.
That’s why we’re taking great care in launching new INQUIRER.net Blogs. We’ve built our network slowly but steadily. It’s what INQUIRER.net editor in chief JV Rufino and I have agreed upon from the very start: we won’t launch a blog unless we’re sure we can sustain it. We’re here for the long haul. And we want to make sure that everyone who blogs for INQUIRER.net will understand that it takes commitment to regularly update these sites.
We believe blogging is fun and rewarding, but we also know that it takes a certain amount of discipline. I guess most of the people who think blogging is easy haven’t actually tried blogging, heh 
I’m happy to say that the number of pageviews and unique visits our blog network is generating has been very encouraging, just a little over two months after we launched our first blog. We now have 11 blogs, with more to come. It’s an interesting balancing act, deciding which wave of blogs to launch next and which niches to address, and I hope you’ll enjoy what we have in store for you in the weeks to come.
This just the beginning. We’re running a marathon. The last thing we want is to launch a blog network and fail to live up to the hype, ending up with blogs that are rarely updated.
We believe our readers deserve better than that.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
hey thanks jim
i really appreciate the support.
cheers!
April 28th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Great post joey. I was suspecting that you’ve been working hard on this side that you’ve put aside your personal blogsite a bit–i’ve been visiting for sometime and it’s still sofielicious, ehehh!–(at one point i thought you’ve substituted @play for your personal blog) come to think of it that you’ve commented one time that another blogger does not regularly update her blog, but your case is different and has a legit reason to be dormant.
but it’s your personal blog, you can do anything with it.
Anyway, I started late in blogging, i mean in everything, I wrote my first blog on friendster then started slow from then on, then read a bit on how to blog, widgets among others. Yeah, I actually started slow but still trying to find my niche but I can say that I’m still sustaining it, though there are silent days.
It’s good that the Inquirer started it slow and evidently becoming more sustained and better. Congratulations and more power!