Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I will never stop blogging

I'm sitting here in mid-day, with three weeks off from medical school, feeling overwhelmed despite having a totally open schedule--I have to write up the findings from my research project in the form of a real scientific paper, to be published in an actual medical journal--so I thought I'd procrastinate by posting a blog entry.

One of the reasons I don't post more often is that I have so much to do in medical school. Now, it's not that I'm always working; I wind up procrastinating as much as anyone else, but as long as I have work to do I usually feel I shouldn't spend the time blogging (merely browsing my favorite blogs is more passive, and thus easier to allow myself to do.) But I like blogging when I can, no matter how infrequently I do it, and thus one of the phenomena I don't understand is permanently closing one's blog. I was thinking about this after reading that Anakin Niceguy is closing up shop. Novaseeker did the same thing in January, and I know there have been other bloggers I used to read, or at least check in on occasionally, whose names I can't remember right now, who announced an official end to blogging. (At least those guys are leaving their blogs up, though. One thing I really can't understand is deleting your blog. Unless you fear that the thought police are coming after you in real life, what harm is there in leaving it up, for posterity's sake?)

Sure, there are disadvantages to being an infrequent blogger, namely, that you lose regular readership. There was a time when I was posting nearly every day, and got a lot more hits than I do now. When it's been weeks since you've posted, people simply stop dropping by, as I myself have with Ganttsquarry and A.J. Travis. But, they may post again someday. Why foreclose that possibility by announcing that you are officially done with blogging?

All of this is not to criticize or argue with people who stop blogging; just to say that, no matter how infrequently I write a substantive post, I'll always be around.