"Only losers blog."

"Only losers blog" is a wisecrack I've often made on social media when the topic of blogging is brought up, usually by someone waxing nostalgic. There's no denying that we're well past the glory days of the classic single-writer, non- (or barely-) commercial blog.

The resulting ghost ships adrift on the seas of the blogosphere are interesting artifacts...

Blogging well requires a tremendous amount of work, including work along the lines of what the socialists call “emotional labor.” That’s evidenced by the phenomenon of the dead blog: one that simply stops updating one day and becomes essentially abandoned.

When a magazine closes down, it goes out a bit like a restaurant or a store. There will often be a final publishing day, maybe a heartfelt note to the readers about the difficult media landscape, a last hurrah. Many websites of shuttered magazines remain online for years, frozen indefinitely; they look just as they did on their final day. Others see their archives moved over to another site, or simply vanish into cyberspace.

For dead blogs, however, the pattern is usually different. Sometimes they end following a building sense of boredom or despair; other times they just end suddenly, with no acknowledgement or last words. Sometimes, a blog’s death is something a reader must divine, rather than a fact explicitly stated by the writer. Quite often, a blogger will intend to get back to blogging, and may even occasionally take a stab at it—“long time no write,” they say guiltily, promising to “post more regularly now”—so it can be debated whether such a blog is really dead. Often, a years-old unfulfilled promise to write more becomes a blog’s unwitting valediction.

Do it long enough and don't rigorously and continually curate that blogroll in the sidebar [guilty cough], and it can turn into something of a digital mausoleum, a dead strip mall on a weed-grown offramp of the information superhighway.

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