DRIED LEMONS
Steven called my attention to this post at John Lemon’s Barrel of Fish that I missed over the weekend:
Over the past month I’ve given some thought to moving off of Blog*Spot to a better service provider. However, this will likelly entail a nominal fee on my part. After further thought, and realizing the time sink that blogging is, I have decided to shut down the Barrel of Fish in the coming weeks. I want to finish off my “why academics are lefties” series, since I have some counterintutive reasons to add to the list of obvious ones, but then I think that is it. I need to concentrate on other things like my own pitiful and droll research, combined with more attention to my family and party politics.
Clearly, John has reached a point–that many bloggers come to–where they feel an obligation to their blogs. The last couple of weeks, I’ve consciously limited my evening and weekend blogging in order to restore it to hobby status rather than work. I’ve seen a modest dropoff in traffic as a result–I’m getting fewer hits from being “updated” on blogrolls and high on the various sites that show “fresh” posts–but am enjoying blogging and the rest of my life more. I’m hoping he’ll do the same; there are a lot of “successful” bloggers that post only occaisionally. Hell, Stephen Green still gets more hits than I do and he’s been off writing a cookbook the past month.
Good grief, yes. Let’s not lose your voices because they’ve been overtaken by THE BLOG. I’ll always read you, James, no matter how infrequently you post.::sigh::
OK, maybe I will rethink. I’m in probably the biggest funk of my career. My idea was to drop the blog and I would devote the summer to my manuscript. But blogging is a good outlet, and it does keep your writing skills sharp. Plus, I’ve been getting a lot of requests to do lectures at a variety of political and Rotary clubs, and blogging just might help me keep my edge. I guess it is a way to do editorial writing for someone who is in no position to write editorials, lest I fall into a greater career funk. I’ll let you folks interpret that last sentence.
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