I've been meaning to think about and perhaps write about life cycles and weblogs, particularly technical or professional ones. If you've been weblog surfing for a while, you've probably noticed that weblogs come and go. Some of them just barely get started and the author loses motivation or time, and they lay dormant with their one or two initial entries.

Others are authored by those who are both inspired and a bit "hungry." These are the folks who are sometimes able to use their weblog to build a solid enough reputation (and readership) that their workload increases with more consulting gigs, conference tours, and even book publishing. At some point in time, they may be so successful that one of two things happens. Their new project sucks up so much time that their weblog languishes, leaving visitors to either check back every so often to see if it comes back or to check out F*cked Weblog to see if it is gone for good. Or, like peterme, you tire of the same old same old, and "mothball" your weblog.

You may, like Peter, warn folks that your revival is who knows when. Or you may, like moi, tell folks the new improved version will be back in January and then finally re-launch in September :(.

I went thru this a bit recently myself after having only been back to full-time weblogging for a few months. But then I had a bit of an aha moment and realized that this was just too much of a great opportunity for me to just journal the things that I found interesting or curious or wanted to save. So, while I will keep checking out my webstats to see if anyone is showing up :), I will no longer set any huge expectations for myself to be the next Doc Searls. And I will try and avoid going offline for 2/3 of a year in the event that I decide to redesign the whole thing!

I will, however, get a nice perk out of doing IDblog for the next few months. One of the courses I'm taking this spring for the University of Baltimore's doctorate of communication design program is Digital Economy. This course looks at "economic and social issues relating to communications design in an age of digital networks." (Ah, takes me back to the MA I did at Georgetown.) As a program that originated out of print publishing, the DCD profs are still finding it useful/necessaryy to get folks exposed to Internet technologies, so...10% of our grade is publishing twice a week to a weblog! Methinks I've got this part covered :).

09:52 PM | linkme | home