The Problem with Blogs: One More Goodbye

It's not always clear why people blog. Most of the blogs I read are Yankees news related and they publish every day during the season. I also have collected some interesting foodie blogs (e.g., eater.com, serious eats New York, etc.).

The more interesting creative blogs are the ones that I have stumbled onto. These are written by people who just share their daily experiences. One of my favorites is written by a web designer cartoonist in the UK, called Local Girl's Day in Pictures. I always looked forward to her posts, but I think she's losing enthusiasm -- I haven't seen anything new in 3 weeks. Another type of blog that I like is the daily photo blog, like Greenwich Village Daily Photo.

I use a couple of RSS feed readers, but mainly read blogs using Google Reader because it has a nice interface and it's easy to keep up with new entries. This morning, New York City Daily Photo had this entry:

New York City Daily Photo is closed as of today.
Thank you for the 2-1/2 years of wonderful friendship and photo sharing experience.
I will update you on what is going on in my life in the next couple of weeks or so .

I was bummed out. I had an actual emotional reaction. Over the past month or two three or four of the blogs have posted similar goodbye messages. Every time I felt sad. Often, like this one, the blog authors are quite cryptic when explaining why they're stopping their blog. I imagine this is the way that people felt after World War II when many daily newspapers began to die off. Cities that had multiple newspapers found themselves with just one. If I were a New York Herald Tribune reader who woke up one day and found that the paper no longer published I would have been quite unsettled.

From what my plugged-in new media friends tell me, the reason to enter the blogosphere is to create a following. I write this blog as a creative outlet, but for me it's more of a diary -- a place to jot some thoughts down whether or not anyone ever reads them. Since I started this blog I have been very inconsistent. Sometimes I have posted entries several times a week and then sometimes a month or more would go by with no entries. What's funny is that I've found myself feeling a little resentful towards the authors of blogs that I follow when they don't update their blogs -- but I'm more guilty than they are!

I remember when I was a kid always being so disappointed when a TV show I liked got cancelled, like the immortal classic Shirley starring Shirley Jones. I guess a blog going dark evokes similar feelings. Well, best wishes to Ming the Merciless, author of the New York City Daily Photo. I'll have to find something else to fill the 30 seconds a day I spent with his blog.