Blogging burnout
2004-09-17 13:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chipotleIf you read various weblogs, you'll often come across ones that seem all but abandoned, whose owners stopped posting to them frequently--or at all--for long periods. Sometimes they're completely abandoned. LiveJournal has a staggering 4.5 million accounts, but only 40% of those are described as "active" by its statistics page, and only 30% have been updated in the last month. Out of the 3.4 million people who've ever updated their LiveJournal, nearly half of them aren't doing it anymore. Welcome to blogging burnout.
I'm not sure where I read the statistic, but the average lifespan of a weblog is about two years. This one's actually been going on, counting its pre-LiveJournal incarnation, since mid-2000. So I'm beating the odds.
No, I'm not about to announce I'm retiring the journal, but I've been thinking about what to do with it and Barking at the Moon.
My experiment with Movable Type as a weblog system wasn't a failure, precisely, but the hard truth is that both MT weblogs attract more spam than actual readers and every day they stay up is another day I spend wasted minutes deleting crap from assholes who think that posting 30 comments to old weblog entries with links to their goddamn porn sites or online casinos will increase their Google rankings.
I spent some time a couple weeks ago reading all of my old journal entries, replaying my life over the last few years. It was interesting, if a little sobering. My job at NetPoodles was worse than I remember it (not that I remember it fondly). I've noticed that I really didn't hold back from the occasional political commentary in the journal, either. "Barking" was created essentially because I was worried about stepping on the toes of more conservative friends, but I've realized that conservatives who are friends won't be bothered by reading something they disagree with occasionally. (For better or worse, it would seem the people I was most trying to avoid offending became offended anyway when, after one's constant broadcasting of liberal-bashing commentary, I got exasperated at his outrage over a crass conservative-bashing political quiz.)
So. What I'm considering doing is bringing the two journals back into one again -- just this LiveJournal. I may finally get around to integrating the LJ with my home page, so it has a journal on it again. LJ seems to be much more spam-resistant than other weblogs are. I don't know whether I'll call the combined journal "Coyote Cartography" or "Barking at the Moon"; I like both names, for different reasons (and actually like both weblog designs, too).
This will have to wait for Claw & Quill to get off the ground (yes, it's still slogging along, and the rest of the month will probably be me returning to the back end work to get some of the remaining heavy lifting, er, lifted), and probably for me to put together a new version of my sadly out of date--and really rather spotty--portfolio.
I'm not sure where I read the statistic, but the average lifespan of a weblog is about two years. This one's actually been going on, counting its pre-LiveJournal incarnation, since mid-2000. So I'm beating the odds.
No, I'm not about to announce I'm retiring the journal, but I've been thinking about what to do with it and Barking at the Moon.
My experiment with Movable Type as a weblog system wasn't a failure, precisely, but the hard truth is that both MT weblogs attract more spam than actual readers and every day they stay up is another day I spend wasted minutes deleting crap from assholes who think that posting 30 comments to old weblog entries with links to their goddamn porn sites or online casinos will increase their Google rankings.
I spent some time a couple weeks ago reading all of my old journal entries, replaying my life over the last few years. It was interesting, if a little sobering. My job at NetPoodles was worse than I remember it (not that I remember it fondly). I've noticed that I really didn't hold back from the occasional political commentary in the journal, either. "Barking" was created essentially because I was worried about stepping on the toes of more conservative friends, but I've realized that conservatives who are friends won't be bothered by reading something they disagree with occasionally. (For better or worse, it would seem the people I was most trying to avoid offending became offended anyway when, after one's constant broadcasting of liberal-bashing commentary, I got exasperated at his outrage over a crass conservative-bashing political quiz.)
So. What I'm considering doing is bringing the two journals back into one again -- just this LiveJournal. I may finally get around to integrating the LJ with my home page, so it has a journal on it again. LJ seems to be much more spam-resistant than other weblogs are. I don't know whether I'll call the combined journal "Coyote Cartography" or "Barking at the Moon"; I like both names, for different reasons (and actually like both weblog designs, too).
This will have to wait for Claw & Quill to get off the ground (yes, it's still slogging along, and the rest of the month will probably be me returning to the back end work to get some of the remaining heavy lifting, er, lifted), and probably for me to put together a new version of my sadly out of date--and really rather spotty--portfolio.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 13:36 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-17 14:04 (UTC)Of course, that journal didn't have comments until it went to MT. :)
LiveJournal offers a lot of spam control simply by allowing the different levels of comment posting access. Right now, I allow comments from everyone but comments from non-LJ users are screened, which means a spammer would have to go through the trouble of actually getting an LJ account specifically to spam from -- which has been done, but it's an extra hurdle the majority won't bother with. And, of course, you can set comments to "friends only" if desired/necessary.