What do you reckon is the average lifespan of a blog?
A personal blog. One year? Pushin’ three? Another figure altogether?
This contemplation comes to mind as I witness another spate of bloggers, a majority of which are Vox transplants, fade into a pinpoint in presence and then permanent obscurity.
For certain it takes energy and work to maintain a blog (particularly one of quality). Bloggers let their blogs go and/or go to sleep for any number of reasons. Lost interest. Life’s events and course. Tragedies. Time-consuming commitments. Depression and withdrawal. Having nothing to say (or thinking so, which makes it true). Other engaging communication modes like Facebook. The list goes on.
I’m curious. When a blogger in your hood ceases to post, would you prefer to be informed through a goodbye, a parting announcement?
Or does the simple and wordless disappearance suffice? Are you troubled by that?
How many bloggers with a cast of regular readers, I wonder, feel an inclination or responsibility to announce an imminent departure (not to be confused with a relocation of the blog).
Most bloggers, to my observation in years of blogging and travels through several sites, just walk away, without words, leaving no trail, abandoning their blogs for the stack of bones of deceased blogs.
In fact, I can’t think of anyone who said goodbye before departing the blogosphere. Not that it hasn’t happened. I’ve just not come across it.
Part II
Sometimes I contemplate why I might quit blogging.
Under what circumstances I might become like many another name on the blogroll that is deleted, another subscription name on the Google Reader to be removed.
I guess what I’d like to say to those who have quit blogging past present and future is that your disappearance is noticed, at least by me. It leaves a small tear in the web.
I’m strange that way; it is the littlest and seemingly imperceptible occurrence or detail that I notice and am touched by with heightened exquisiteness. That’s all for today.
Barefoot Blogger 
Apr 01, 2011 @ 04:57:52
I completely relate. I’ve lost almost all my fellow bloggers from VOX, and I rarely blog myself anymore. I still read some friend’s stuff, though now that’s down to just a few, but I post only occasionally, and a good portion of it (the political stuff, anyway) is not usually my own. I want to blog more, I constantly have ideas rolling around in my head, but for me it’s a time issue. I have time to read but not to write.
Apr 01, 2011 @ 15:51:06
@lexiemom – Good that you’re reading, methinks; in a world of fast-food communications, Facebook, Twitter and 15-second soundbites, it’s becoming something of a lost practice. ;( I enjoy your posts when you do ’em, political pieces by others included. 😉
Apr 01, 2011 @ 06:11:31
I would prefer to hear from the bloggers I read that they would be ‘closing’ their posts.
I have several that I have seen nothing from since the move from Vox and that makes me a little sad.
Though I do not always comment, I fully enjoy your blog and would hate to see you go, though life does come and push us around sometimes making a blog too much to deal with also.
Good luck on your up-coming move and I hope to hear from you again!
Apr 01, 2011 @ 15:47:43
@Lauren – Thanks for commenting! And thanks for reading. It’s appreciative readers like you who help fuel the blogging fires for me. 🙂
Apr 01, 2011 @ 15:49:12
Whenever you say things like this I wonder if I’m supposed to go stand in the corner. Yeah, that guilty crush hits me like a sledge hammer. You’re right tho’…. 🙂
Apr 01, 2011 @ 17:36:43
@Raymond – We’d lost you for a good long while there, Raymond, inspiring a lot of us (myself included) to query one another about your whereabouts. You’re one of the fortunate ones in that regard. Others disappear with but scanty souls inquiring. How soon we forget sometimes those who enriched our blogging experience.
Apr 02, 2011 @ 03:33:07
People do this for different reasons. Sometimes those reasons become less important, sometimes more. The tide comes in and then goes out again.
It’s ok to become silent for a while if you wish. Writers often are.
The problem is readers, which may not still be around when you wake up.
The little community of reader/writers that was the old comfortable neighborhood will likely vanish. I would hope that new people will drift in, but it’s clear that the tone and mixture of personalities and content won’t survive being uprooted.
And besides, life sometimes intrudes.
So enjoy yourself. Don’t feel obliged. When your interest returns, the blank page will still be waiting right here.
Apr 04, 2011 @ 03:06:16
Personally, I’d prefer an “official” closing post, because otherwise I’d begin to worry if something happened to the blogger (accident, illness or even death).
On the other hand, I understand if someone just “let’s go”…
My first photography blog was a project limited to 365 Days, so the end of the blog was known right from the start.
When I started my current photography blog, I posted something about every second day.
However, lately there are so many other things that occupy my time, that the posts are not that frequent anymore. And I can see there is a “danger” in that – if you don’t make it a “ritual”, there is the possibility to leave behind everything.
I suppose many people quit blogging entirely, because there are other things that have priority in their life…
Apr 04, 2011 @ 13:45:53
@fotografzahl – You’re spot on about the “danger” (risk) in increasingly infrequent blogging. Matter of fact, I can’t think of a formerly regular blogger who narrowly escaped the final drop-off in blogging and returned full force. Or half force. Once blogging falls into the Infrequent Zone, more often than not it portends ze end.