The hot new trend in blogging is quitting

Ted Olsen, one of the original bloggers at Christianity Today, has posted a bitingly witty article on how blogs are passing away.

As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol’s famous aphorism was modified to read, “In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.” Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.

Olsen cites a study saying that 200 million people have given up blogging this year!  Try naming anything else that 200 million people have done.

One of the more profound quotes comes from Alan Jacobs who says that “the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought” (but Jacobs has two blogs!)  Maybe blogs are the CB radio of the 2000s.  We can broadcast our message and make it look pretty, but we find we don’t have that much to say.

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On a personal note, my friend Summer (who always had a lot of worthwhile content) is, as usual, on the bleeding edge of this trend.  She completely and suddenly dumped her blog last week.  I dreamed last night that she brought it back, with no explanation too!  No such luck.  Ah, Summer-breeze, you made us feel fine…blowing through the collective jasmine of our collective minds! :)

September 26, 2007 · Filed Under Web

Comments

4 Responses to “The hot new trend in blogging is quitting”

  1. sumgirl on September 26th, 2007 8:50 am

    awesome article, by the way. everything in it struck a chord for me and, i would venture to say, every other blogger out there. my favorite part though was this …

    “When Catholic blogger Amy Welborn shut down [her blog] ‘Open Book’ in August to focus on writing books, she wrote: “I want to do good, and I want to do lasting good — the kind of good that people carry around, share, put on their bookshelves and reflect on — rather than the kind of good that sparks a momentary flash until we surf to the next website and the next and the next.”

    yup - that pretty much sums it up.
    thanks for the reference. :D just this morning i was trying to reason blogging again because there is always something i want to say. but, still, i am comfortable in my decision … and i’m sticking with it. well … for a while … i think … ;)

  2. Follower on September 26th, 2007 9:41 pm

    awwww…don’t give up blogging sumgirl…you either Dennis… you touch lives. How do you know you haven’t touched a nerve in an otherwise too ordinary life…. and created a desire that leads to someone deciding to get up and go on when they felt like giving up. Think about it. There is nothing wrong with writing a book…so it can sit on a bookshelf. But the surfers who are out here looking for that something that gives impetus do better…be better is needed to chip away at all of the negativity that life throws in our paths. So bloggers who share their bright spots every day or so, sharing their walk enable those who might be stumbling to get up and start over again. Just a thought………..

  3. Marsha on September 27th, 2007 5:43 am

    Amen!!! I have been very, very inspired by blogs of certain people including the aforementioned. Besides some of us don’t have time to go to the library or bookstore.

  4. the girl who blogged wolf « on October 4th, 2007 6:59 pm

    [...] girl who blogged wolf October 4th, 2007 my friend dennis (who has been entirely distraught at my unjustified decision to leave the shelf) pointed me at this article about how the trend to [...]

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