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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Burnout a sign that blog boom bogging down

Frank Sennett Correspondent

Robert Scoble looks about as much like a rock star as I do.

But performing on his Scobleizer blog for a daily audience of 20,000-50,000 visitors makes Microsoft’s technical evangelist feel like a guitar god being called onstage for an endless encore.

“There’s always incredible pressure to post,” Scoble said from Redmond last week. “It weirds you out after a while.”

Welcome to blog burnout.

After five years blogging for Microsoft, Scoble took two weeks off last month. He returned with a commitment to “taking care of myself and my family as much as I’m taking care of the blog,” as he put it in a post.

Battling burnout for Scoble entails everything from eating healthier and paying more attention to his wife to banning mean-spirited comment “trolls” and reaching out to some smart folks with whom he’d lost contact.

“A good blog is passionate and authoritative,” Scoble said. “It’s hard to say something intelligent day after day after day.”

As the medium matures, more pioneers of personality-driven blogs hit that wall. Dave Winer, proprietor of Scripting News, slapped an exclamation point on the trend in March by announcing he’ll end his influential tech blog after a decade. Scripting News ranks with Scobleizer as one of the Top 100 blogs indexed by the Technorati search engine. Even so, Winer wrote recently, “if ‘The West Wing’ can stop, if ‘The Sopranos’ can stop, then so can a blog.”

For proof, visit sarahhepola.com, the site of a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who told the wired world she was bailing on her blog last month in a Slate essay she initially pitched as a trend piece.

In print journalism, syndicated columnists offer the closest parallel to solo blog stars. But while columnists might file a couple of pieces a week and enjoy typical white-collar vacation schedules without harming their careers, top bloggers can see their traffic slip after taking even a few days off. Worn down by that constant need for feed, many long-timers are taking a long look at different creative outlets.

Fans watching some of the blogosphere’s leading lights reach for the off switch or dimmer can be excused for feeling a melancholy twinge of déjÀ vu. This period of transition is reminiscent of the dot-com-bust era, when popular first-wave content sites such as Suck and Feed suddenly froze in time.

“People underestimate the time and attention it takes to do a meaningful blog,” Sarah Hepola said via phone. “Society’s going to get used to people shutting down their blogs and picking them back up after a few years.”

Of course, small-fry bloggers have been abandoning sites with abandon for years. Nearly half of all blogs stop posting new content after three months, according to Technorati CEO David Sifry’s recent State of the Blogosphere report. Nine out of 10 blogs – active ones included – aren’t even updated weekly.

Many people start blogs on a whim and quickly ditch them. Others move on in the face of life changes. But some blogs are intended to be short-term projects.

Consider, for instance, The Right Honorable Samuel A. Alito Jr., a satirical site that ran out of gas when its subject was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The creator of NewInPhilly.com ended his blog after a year because he no longer considered himself new to Philadelphia. And a relieved husband mothballed CPT Patti: The Sweetest Woman on the Planet Goes to Baghdad after that blog’s subject returned safely.

But no matter how famous or obscure they are, bloggers who stick with their sites inevitably will face burnout. Microsoft’s Scoble offered them one piece of advice: “If it’s not fun, change it – or do something else.”