Blatigue Redux
A few weeks ago, I introduced the term Blatigue to describe the overwhelming sense of pressure that most bloggers come to feel at one point in their blogging "career" or another. I know this author has.
Gadgetopia points to "Bloggers Suffer Burnout", Wired's version of the the New York Times piece. Though the sentiment s are the same, some interesting points are brought to the surface.
Blogging Breeds Conversation - The majority of blogs that I visit do not garner significant commentary. I've often tried to rationalize why this may or may not be so, but it's anyone's guess right now. On the other hand, those individuals that do comment on things very close to the hearts of their readers are often bombarded with messages, some good, some bad, and many in between.
Comments create an issue on two fronts. On the one hand, they provide an outlet for those bastard spammers. I know that as the sites I write for become more and more indexed, more and more SPAM comments have to be eradicated. On the other hand, and the more important one really, there's the conversation to maintain. Visitors are engaging the author in dialog which creates a pressure to not only digest their thoughts, but to reply in kind. When there's one or two comments, not so bad. When there's 100 or more, it's Everest.
"You've only got so many hours in the day, and like most bloggers, I've got a full-time day job, and something had to give," Billmon said. "In the end, monitoring comments on my blog was becoming a progressively larger part of my blogging time, and I just got to the point where I wasn't able to keep up with it."
Blogging Breeds Dependency - Once a reader is hooked onto a blog, they are constantly polling it for their next fix. Anyone who's checked their logs can see who the most common hosts are and even how often they're checking in.
An interesting correlation between health and post level is made:
Several bloggers contacted for this story noted that their readers seem to look at their regular, consistent posting patterns as somewhat akin to a sign of physical health. And any break in that pattern is sometimes seen as a cause for alarm.
"I know that if I go more than about five or six hours without posting, or telling people that I'm not going to be blogging for the rest of the day," said Reynolds, readers e-mail him and say, "You haven't posted anything in five or six hours. Are you OK?"
Blogging Breeds Pressure - It is still debatable exactly how much attention one's blog actually generates, but there is a gut feeling that tells every author that they are not alone (and sometimes statistics by way of referrer logs and the like). But the pressure is there and for man it just continues to rise till they collapse from it.
"There's always pressure to have new content up on the site," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, author of the anti-Bush blog Daily Kos (Moulitsas Zuniga is married to a regular Wired News contributor). "And it's not like my readers are calling me up and saying, 'What the hell?' But you can sense it. You can sense it when you post something new and 10 minutes later there's 50 comments. You can almost feel they were sitting there waiting."
Blogging Breeds Anxiety - Naturally, when there's pressure, there's anxiety. Discovering and creating content can be time-consuming, if not complicated tasks. Bloggers either have a well of stored thoughts and ideas they wish to relate or they must rummage through the fields to find new ideas to post about. It's may be hard to imagine, but there are often times where I know in the back of my mind I am thinking "That's not a good post" or "Posting was light this week". Turns out, I'm not alone.
"There are lulls where nothing seems interesting, where people are just talking about (blogging gadfly) David Winer again, and I say, what the fuck," said Kottke, who himself depends at least in part on the blogosphere for good fodder for his site. "Sometimes it gets harder to find interesting stuff to talk about. There are 3 million blogs, and everyone is talking about everything. It's tough to deal with that sometimes, and you don't want to just be another person talking about the same stuff that everybody else is talking about."
Eventually, this all leads to severe Blatigue and possibly event complete burnout. Have you been nice to your blogger today?