The New York Times Sheds A Tear For Your Orphaned Blogs

Have you heard of these things called blogs? Well the New York Times certainly has, and they're exposing the wacky phenomenon of people starting blogs and then abandoning them. It's all 2001 up in here!

The Times article focuses on the blog-abandoning phenomenon, wherein a well-meaning internet user starts up a blog and then decides that the blog isn't worth the time or the energy. I know, you guys, this is pretty deep stuff. I'd post about it on my Friendster/MySpace/Blurty/Xanga/Angelfire/Geocities/Blogger/Wordpress page, but I don't remember any of the passwords to those and haven't used them in a looooong time. Where's my NYTimes trend piece?!

Anyhoo, the article focuses on blogger Judy Nichols, who once started a soccer mom blog before getting sick of it and abandoning it completely. "Like Mrs. Nichols," Douglas Quenqua of the Times writes, "Many people start blogs with lofty aspirations - to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?"

Quenqua notes that blogging platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have killed off the need to blog for many people, and that the immediacy of such programs has rendered long-form blogs into tl;dr territory. Many bloggers, he notes, drop their blogs when they realize that nobody is reading them, or when they feel that their privacy is at risk. Some people, he claims, get sick of blogging and want to do other things. I know, right? My mind is also blown.

So here's to you, blog orphans. May you go on forever, time capsules of those three weeks we were really bored in 2004, a memory locked in a basic blogging platform format, left to wander in the Dickensian hallways of the internet, darkened corners filled with the detritus of the era and lost to technological revolutions, so that our children may someday find you and have the ability to mock us for our lame taste in music and emo poetry. And here's to you, New York Times Style Section, for always keeping it real, 5 years after the fact. Hit us up and we will totally let you in to our ICQ chat room.

When The Thrill Of Blogging Is Gone [NYTimes]