Disappearing Bloggers

Another of my favourite bloggers (Legomen) has just upped and gone. That's the second in a fortnight! The previous one was Raised by Chaffinches, where the author had been writing (presumably unflatteringly) about one of his friends. Said friend had found out and was upset by it. Hmmm.

I'm still fairly new to this blogging lark, having been doing it for only about six months. So I don't know if it is typical that people get fed up after a couple of years and just pack it in. Or maybe these shutdowns are related to fears about job security .

I have read a few bits and pieces where bloggers have described the various phases of bloggery. You start off keen, and publish your entire life story in the first month. Then you settle down a bit, talk about the weather and what you bought at the shops today. Then maybe you get bored and your posts become less frequent. Maybe your life gets a bit more interesting (because you are spending less time blogging), so you blog about it some more.

There's a lot of tosh talked about blogs, especially the journalism aspect. It is true that blogging is a new form of journalism, but only in the literal sense of keeping a journal. To think that it can replace newspapers and broadcast news, as some pundits have claimed, is utter garbage. True, if you are a blogger on the spot when some great catastrophe occurs - the Asian tsunami is a case in point - then you have a channel to instantly tell the world what's happening. You might even get your fifteen minutes of fame. But the great majority of blogs are not about news.

Anyhoo, time to update my Blogroll.