I seriously considered giving up blogging in the summer of 2003 because of the flame-wars surrounding not blogging itself but the formats in which weblog entries were delivered. It came to a head when he who must not be named announced he was quitting blogging and then four hours later returned. So I'm finding a discussion on why people have quit blogging very interesting. I agree with M's disgust with the terms "blog" and "blogsophere" (I will not use the latter without quotes, and have not myself used the word in this weblog, although those I've quoted have and necessarily will in the future). "Weblog" is a neologism, surely, but at least it has something I love (the web) in its name, and the "blogosphere" is an attempt to not only separate weblogs from the Internet as a medium but also make the community of bloggers—I don't have problems with the words "blogging" or "bloggers" as nouns or the word "blog" as a verb, so watch me shrug as you point out my hypocrisy—into a space or place, when it's really a group of people. People aren't places. M's social needs are fulfilled through media other than weblogs (again, I wish weblogs weren't media, but maybe that's unavoidable), and that's perfectly acceptable. We want our heroes or friends to have weblogs, but what if they would get no enjoyment out of blogging? Who are we to tell people to do what they don't want to do?
There's more worth checking out, and all the reasons the responders have are good ones. A month or so ago, I was blogging because it had become my habit to, which isn't always a good thing: if you're doing something only because that's what you've always been doing, some re-evaluation is needed. I've only recently seen how blogging can help me in a more than intellectual way, so a re-evaluation helped both in shaping how I blog and why I blog now.
I'd love to help you quit blogging, but I can't, because I fell in love with it again.
