That’s because we just keep on posting. The typical blogger, like most people who go on diets and budgets, quits after a few months, weeks, or in many cases, days. For some reason, we haven’t. In fact, if you look at the “Archives” chart to the right, you’ll see that by the time July is over, we will have blogged more this month than in any of the previous 16 months. I’d attribute this mainly to you — readers who take the time to read. And especially readers who send us interesting e-mails or links. Granted, it’s a little easier to keep up a blog when there are two people to share the load.
So even though Levitt and I may complain to each other occasionally about feeling compelled to feed the blog beast, the laws of economics tell me that we must enjoy it on some level or we would have abandoned it long ago.
12 Comments
As you alluded to, the largest contributing factor is audience. A small percentage of bloggers only write to fulfill their own needs.
The rest that start blogging in an concerted effort to cater to an audience, eventually falter due to the fact that there is almost more bloggers than their are blog readers. Hence, the lack of a motivation to continue the chore that blogging on a regular basis can be.
But, it’s not like I am telling you something you already didn’t know.
— zirottiAs long as you guys keep blogging we will keep reading. Keep it up; I look forward to reading your posts every day.
— Travis0485I have a blog on LiveJournal but only a couple people read it, so I don’t post much. Having a journal there also means that you can comment in other groups and communities, which is the fun part about LiveJournal anyway.
Also, I only really read blogs that post news about my interests or new pictures… and this one of course.
— yelsa307What that doesn’t take into account is reading privileges. At least 3 of my journals would show no activity to the casual browser, because they’re either friends-locked or entirely private.
Quite a lot of people on LJ have writing journals, which are used to store chapters of books in order to have a safer place to get to them.
— angelofthenorthI have a blog (about Tradesports), that has linked to your blog several times. I am glad that you offer such a rich selection of material, and that much of it is relevant to the players in the predictive information markets.
— caveatBettorquitting? lol. I get a sense that people who haven’t blogged for a long time, say 6+ months, aren’t really bloggers yet. Just pre-natal bloggers perhaps. I’ve been blogging pretty constantly for at least 5 years. But I would have said I was an author because I wrote a draft of a story. Or a diarist because I kept some notes of my trip to France once. So, the question, as with all good questions is not ‘what’ but ‘when’. When is someone a blogger… time and dedication are reasonable features of a blogger. And of course LJ rulz.
— jasonnolanThey don’t seem to have accounted for all the “placeholder” blogs (my term) that people create, simply to reserve their user name on a particular blogging service. For example, I have a regularly updated blog on LJ, but I also have placeholders on JournelFen, GreatestJournal, and MySpace. These don’t get updated; they exist in case LJ goes under, or all my friends switch services, and so on.
— Andy PerrinWell I would say that the typical consumer blog service used by teens and young adults is very heavy on network effects. I originally had a blog that I liked but as certain friends gravitated towards a different service I found that I had to switch to easily read and comment upon their writing. Then once one person in the group stops writing and reading, there is less reason for the others to visit the site. I would say that the main reason that I actually started writing in a blog is that friends just stopped using that medium to communicate. Very few people whose opinions I care about would notice the blog so I just talk to them directly. This is kind of unfortunate because a blog is a great medium for kind of getting a lot of opinions on a broad topic.
— synapticmisfiresThink of this blog as a down-payment on future book sales, for both Freakonomics and others to come.
I admire the effort.
— smiliTechnorati.com, the service that tags blogs, says that there are 49.5 million blogs, 75,000 blogs are added daily and “Bloggers update their weblogs regularly; there are about 1.2 million posts daily, or about 50,000 blog updates an hour”. So someone is submitting bloglets :P
The World Internet Project - the body that co-ordinates the collection of data worldwide by surveying peoples usage of technology - lost their domain name (worldinternetproject.net) on the 17 July. Far greater than the loss of meandering waffling blogs is the potential loss of their statistics. In spite of how expensive it was for me to get my (non-corporate) hands on their data, I could cry. In fact I think I will. :(
Tallyho! to the virtual graveyard for all these net diaries. I guess soon there will be more dead blogs than dead people? (BTW any chance you boys can turn PREVIEW on? :)kthnxbai)
— lpapworthTHere is a town here in CT that recently enacted an ordinance requireing all dogs and cats to be fixed or the owner is required to pay a fee to exempt their pet.
— EorrFUThis is a unique blog in content and in frequency. Tell Gladwell to get a co-author so he’ll post more on his blog too.
— Dale