Brayden King is in Depression, Stage 4 of the Five Stages of Blogging. Characterized by morbid feelings that your blog may somehow get you into trouble, this stage follows Denial (“I don’t really have a blog, it’s just a webpage I update sometimes”), Anger (“Why the hell isn’t anyone reading my blog?”), and Bargaining (“I’ll only post once a day, I promise”). Fortunately it is usually followed in short order by Acceptance.
{ 8 comments }
Keith M Ellis 03.12.04 at 9:52 am
I haven’t been updating my blog because I’ve been in a deep, honest-to-goodness medical depression. I can make a few comments here and elsewhere; but right now, I don’t have either the motivation or the self-regard to be finding much of value to say on my blog, so I don’t.
Even in the most positive and active emotional state, I remain baffled by how people can write many blog entries a day. I mean, I don’t even work and I spend most of my time learning new things or keeping up with my intellectual interests on the net. And I’m opinionated and talkative. I should be a prime candidate for blog blabbermouth. But I’m not.
I don’t have inhibitions about jumping into conversations; but to think that I have a whole slew of things important enough to say every day to present blindly to some presumed audience? Not so much.
JB 03.12.04 at 6:32 pm
Cure for blog-ression; imagine the un-fleshed hordes who could at any instant listen.
And don’t keep track of traffic.
neil 03.12.04 at 8:01 pm
You can add Arthur Silber to the list of bloggers in the “Anger” phase. No, really, please.. maybe if you send a few hits his way he’ll come out of the sulk and start writing again.
Stentor 03.12.04 at 8:27 pm
The key is not to take “important enough to say” as a criterion of “important enough to blog.” While some people (such as our hosts here) can do it, the rest of us just fill blogspace with dumb posts on the evilness of zebra mussels and so forth. If you keep your Blogging finger loosened up, eventually something interesting will spill out.
Sebastian Holsclaw 03.12.04 at 11:54 pm
I avoid the anger phase by not looking at my sitemeter. But can anyone explain why the daily hit counter sometimes goes down in the middle of the day. Was my writing so bad the person who read traveled through time and kept himself from reading it? Not that I look at the sitemeter…..
Maria 03.13.04 at 11:00 am
I’m with Keith. And every time Henry tells me how much CT traffic has grown, the stage fright gets so bad I pretty much stop blogging for 3 weeks…
So it’s just as well that I think at least half CT’s value comes from its commenters – no offense intended to co-bloggers!
John Quiggin 03.13.04 at 10:06 pm
For those of us in the later stages, I think the techniques of credit counselling rather than grief counselling are appropriate. A case study:
Prof JQ* maxed out his third personal blog a year ago, but then got additional credit on a group blog, as well as commenting on numerous others. He no longer has the time to actually read blogs, let along primary sources of information, instead relying on email alerts, Trackback pings and RSS feeds. He currently owes his employers 10 000 hours and the total is continuously rising.
* All names in this story have been changed.
David Tiley 03.16.04 at 9:01 am
If you are blogging opinion – most of which is pretty similar – there is a lot to be said for group blogs like this one. Add a guest system on top and a lot of diverse people get to use the internet to talk about what they really understand with a large audience.
My stats, from Australia, are weird. Who is prowling my site at five in the morning? And the answer is – you lot, probably in your lunch hour. Thank you; I yam chommed. Maybe Sebastian’s string of readers get their sandwiches out and think: “Hmm.. its lunch time. Think I’ll just go visit some really strange people overseas..
Blogging for me is about practice. I work, like so many of us, with words and this is the perfect space to push the limits and explore. Professional communication is so often constipating.
And to be serious for a moment about Quigs delightful but sadly too rare quip,
his internet time is well spent on the project of public intellectualism. Something we so desperately need.
And every time I find Keith on a comment, as he too makes his rounds across the digital world, I am glad to read them. Don’t you just think that is fantastic? There is a planet separating us… etc etc.
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