For those addicted to themselves. Haha.
May 27, 2004
I don't know of I'm actually allowed to post this here, due to copyright issues, etc. But, hey, if someone from the NY Times is actually reading this? That's awesome (though seriously doubtful). Otherwise, thanks to Jing for sending me this article. I'm not this addicted yet...
For Some, the Blogging Never Stops
May 27, 2004
By KATIE HAFNER
TO celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and
his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West,
Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms.
Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom.
He stayed there for a long time.
"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was
going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door,
she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees,
typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about
the technical world, over a wireless link.
Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a
few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often
feel compelled to write several times daily and feel
anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time
hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends
and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They
blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as
not to call attention to their habit.
"It seems as if his laptop is glued to his legs 24/7," Ms.
Matthews said of her husband.
The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites
like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog.
Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5
million blogs.
Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at
best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the
novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.
Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets
in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have
so many people written so much to be read by so few. By
Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users
read blogs.
Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a
writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having
conversations largely with themselves.
Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at
Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know
how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But
that does not seem to bother him.
"I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.
Nor
is he deterred by the fact that he toils for hours at a
time on his blog for no money. He gets satisfaction in
other ways. "Sometimes there's an 'I told you so' aspect to
it," he said. Recent ruminations on wigblog .blogspot.com
have focused on Gmail, Google's new e-mail service. Mr.
Wiggins points with pride to Wigblog posts that voiced
early privacy concerns about Gmail.
Perhaps a chronically small audience is a blessing. For it
seems that the more popular a blog becomes, the more some
bloggers feel the need to post.
Tony Pierce started his blog three years ago while in
search of a distraction after breaking up with a
girlfriend. "In three years, I don't think I've missed a
day," he said. Now Mr. Pierce's blog (www
.tonypierce.com/blog/bloggy.htm), a chatty diary of
Hollywood, writing and women in which truth sometimes
mingles with fiction, averages 1,000 visitors a day.
Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely
ardent, Mr. Pierce is more realistic. "I wouldn't call it
dedicated, I would call it a problem," he said. "If this
were beer, I'd be an alcoholic."
Mr. Pierce, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler
in the entertainment industry, said blogging began to feel
like an addiction when he noticed that he would rather be
with his computer than with his girlfriend - for technical
reasons.
"She's got an iMac, and I don't like her computer," Mr.
Pierce said. When he is at his girlfriend's house, he feels
"antsy." "We have little fights because I want to go home
and write my thing," he said.
Mr. Pierce described the rush he gets from what he called
"the fix" provided by his blog. "The pleasure response is
twofold," he said. "You can have instant gratification;
you're going to hear about something really good or bad
instantly. And if I feel like I've written something good,
it's enjoyable to go back and read it."
And, he said, "like most addictions, those feelings go away
quickly. So I have to do it again and again."
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, 26, a graduate student at the School
of Information Management and Systems at the University of
California at Berkeley who has studied bloggers, said that
for some people blogging has supplanted e-mail as a way to
procrastinate at work.
People like Mr. Pierce, who devote much of their free time
to the care and feeding of their own blogs and posting to
other blogs, do so largely because it makes them feel
productive even if it is not a paying job.
The procrastination, said Scott Lederer, 31, a fellow
graduate student with Mr. Hall, has a collective feel to
it. "You feel like you're participating in something
important, because we're all doing it together," he said.
Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, a company that
builds Web sites for newspapers and magazines, and a
blogging enthusiast, defended what he called one's
"obligation to the blog."
"The addictive part is not so much extreme narcissism," Mr.
Jarvis said. "It's that you're involved in a conversation.
You have a connection to people through the blog."
Some compulsive bloggers take their obligation to extremes,
blogging at the expense of more financially rewarding
tasks.
Mr. Wiggins has missed deadline after deadline at Searcher,
an online periodical for which he is a paid contributor.
Barbara Quint, the editor of the magazine, said she did all
she could to get him to deliver his columns on time. Then
she discovered that Mr. Wiggins was busily posting articles
to his blog instead of sending her the ones he had
promised, she said. "Here he is working all night on
something read by five second cousins and a dog, and I'm
willing to pay him," she said.
Ms. Quint has grown more understanding of his reasons, if
not entirely sympathetic. "The Web's illusion of
immortality is sometimes more attractive than actual cash,"
she said.
Jocelyn Wang, a 27-year-old marketing manager in Los
Angeles, started her blog, a chronicle of whatever happens
to pop into her head (www.jozjozjoz.com), 18 months ago as
an outlet for boredom.
Now she spends at least four hours a day posting to her
blog and reading other blogs. Ms. Wang's online journal is
now her life. And the people she has met through the blog
are a large part of her core of friends.
"There is no real separation in my life," she said. Like
Mr. Wiggins, Ms. Wang blogs while on vacation. She stays on
floors at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco with access to a
free Internet connection. ("So I can blog," she explains.)
Blogging for a cause can take on a special urgency.
Richard Khoe, a political consultant in Washington who in
his spare time helps run a pro-John Kerry group called Run
Against Bush, posts constantly to the blog embedded in the
group's Web site (www.runagainstbush.org). He blogs late
into the night, although he knows that the site still
attracts relatively few visitors.
"Sometimes you get really particular with the kind of link
you want, so you search a little more, then a little more,
then you want to see what other people are saying about
that link you chose," he said. "And before you know it,
some real time has passed."
Others find they are distracted to the point of
neglectfulness. Tom Lewis, 35, a project manager for a
software firm in western Massachusetts who has a photo blog
(tomdog.buzznet.com/user), has occasionally shown up
"considerably late" for events and has put off more than a
few work-related calls to tend to his blog.
Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a
routine rather than an obsession. "It's a habit," he said.
"What you're really doing is telling people about something
that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of
your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part
of you."
The constant search for bloggable moments is what led
Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the
point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27,
started a blog that focused on technical topics.
"I was trying to record all thoughts and speculations I
deemed interesting," he said. "Sort of creating a digital
alter ego. The obsession came from trying to capture as
much as possible of the good stuff in my head in as high
fidelity as possible."
For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home,
late into the night, day in and day out until it all became
a blur - all the while knowing, he added, "that no one was
necessarily reading it, except for myself."
When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise,
he began devoting half a day every day and much of the
weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of
that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging.
He was saved from the rut of his online chronicle when he
traveled to Asia. The blog became more of a travelogue.
Then Mr. Rothfuss switched jobs, finding one he enjoyed,
and his blogging grew more moderate.
He still has the blog, but posts to it just twice a week,
he said, "as opposed to twice an hour." He feels healthier
now. "It's part of what I do now, it's not what I do," he
said.
Suffering from a similar form of "blog fatigue," Bill
Barol, a freelance writer in Santa Monica, Calif., simply
stopped altogether after four years of nearly constant
blogging.
"It was starting to feel like work, and it was never
supposed to be a job," Mr. Barol said. "It was supposed to
be an anti-job."
Even with some 200 visitors to his blog each day, he has
not posted to his blog since returning from a month of
travel.
Still, Mr. Barol said, he does not rule out a return to
blogging someday.
"There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of
snowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer
momentum of several years' posting becomes very keenly
felt," he said. "And the absence of posting feels like - I
don't know, laziness or something."
Tim Gnatek contributed reporting for this article.