As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol's famous aphorism was modified to read, "In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people." Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.
Tech researcher Gartner Inc. reported earlier this year that 200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active.
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer toldreporters. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Given the average lifespan of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, Gartner says blogging has probably peaked.
Which isn't to say that blogging is dead. Quite the opposite. Blog aggregator Technoratiestimates that 3 million new blogs are launched every month. The site's tongue-in-cheek slogan: "Zillions of photos, videos, blogs, and more. Some of them have to be good."
Actually, some Christian blogs are very good. What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering, however, is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency.
As conservative political blogger Glenn Reynolds told Wired News in 2004, "I know that if I go more than about five or six hours without posting or telling people that I'm not going to be blogging for the rest of the day, [I'll get worried messages asking,] 'You haven't posted anything in five or six hours. Are you okay?'"
"Good bloggers work like dogs," says Michael Parsons, editor of the tech site CNet.co.uk. ...
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Ted Olsen is Christianity Today's editorial director. He wrote the magazine's Weblog—a collection of news and opinion articles from mainstream news sources around the world—from 1999 to 2006. In 2004, the magazine launched Weblog in Print, which looks for unexpected connections and trends in articles appearing in the mainstream press. The column was later renamed "Tidings" and ran until 2007.
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