However, for every Lowewood, there’s a blog whose passing is positively welcomed. These include blogs whose creators steal pictures from other sites and pass them off as original compositions, taking credit where it definitely isn’t deserved; and those that spend their time making nasty and judgemental remarks, spreading webs of lies, unpleasant inferences and insults in the name of kink. I’ll happily raise a glass to the demise of this latter sort of blog which, even if it can sometimes be amusing, is destructive rather than creative and has no place in a community which I’ve so far found to be largely tolerant and supportive of its members.

I do very much agree that it’s much easier writing if one’s in the right frame of mind… If one’s not feeling relaxed/ kinky/ creative, or if it feels like a duty rather than a pleasure, or if one couldn’t write about R/L kink stuff without it having an adverse effect on others / friendships, then it’s far harder and would sometimes be far better not to write.

I think for me, blogging is enjoyable only as an every-so-often sort of activity, especially for my personal blog. When I feel like writing, it’s generally something longer (rarely do I have an entry under 500 words) about something that seems worth thinking about in public and with my fingers. Further, it has to be something I both want to write and feel like writing. Promising an entry on a specific topic, be it a party report or review is the best way for me to ensure that I won’t blog.

Basically what it comes down to is that this is recreation so I have to make sure it doesn’t become “slog.”

The in public part is key. When I’m feeling depressed or just insular, even the relatively private task of blogging is too public. Those times I write in solitude if I write at all. Since I’m quite introverted, those times are quite frequent.

Other times I feel like playing and sometimes the energy put into writing about spanking somehow translates into real spankings not happening.

That said (and clearly I feel unaccountably defensive) my “slow blogging” won’t be stopping anytime soon. Despite breaks of up to 6 months, el tercer ojo alone has had 176 posts since I started blogging in late 2004. That doesn’t include another 40 plus over at the PB.

I can only speculate on the general reasons so many blogs go defunct. A good one is that a lot of people aren’t writers by nature. Real life gets in the way. Further (and saddest), those of us who came to kink writing via usenet have an advantage in terms of having known before we started blogging how much we needed / wanted to protect our identities and how to do it. I’ve seen too many people in the past few years reveal way too much (for them) in their blogs only to have the information come back and bite them in negative ways. It’s one of the reasons I suggest everyone who starts a new blog put a statcounter on it. It’s way too easy to believe that only a few friends are reading when in reality a blog is getting hundreds or thousands of hits a day.

Whatever’s going on isn’t lack of readers — StatCounter says that number keeps going up. If only they all left a comment!

I cant speak for the 97 defunct blogs on your own reading list, but I can say that when I started my now sadly neglected blog I had a few goals including forcing myself to step outside of my usually highly guarded private inner world and interacting with like-minded folks. And while I thoroughly enjoyed my brief stint as a blog writer when I was in a generally good frame of mind, I found that as personal issues cropped up in my kink life that heavily guarded privacy became harder to overcome and that I could accomplish goal #2 just as easily by commenting on other people’s blogs.

I’ve left the blog up because I do intend to return, but right now I’m operating under the guiding principle of “if you don’t have anything nice to say…” And I am ever so grateful for all of the wonderful bloggers out there who are far more committed than I

Thanks for a fascinating comment.

You’re very right that blogs in themselves were an evolution of other types of site – I look at the SSS newsgroup (for example) today, and it’s a shadow of its former self. And I don’t see that many people these days setting up websites of their own writing – like the Treehouse, Two Shades of Blue or my own stories site (which started in 1999).

I’m amazed after four years of our blog that the ideas keep flowing, and that we’re still so enthusiastic. You have a few years’ head start on us, though! I doubt we’ll ever start posting porn here – that’s just not what we do – and The Spanking Writers isn’t that commercial (the odd dollar we make from e.g. book sales scarcely makes a dent in the investment we’ve made in the site over the years). But I understand the temptation to want to ‘commercialise’ blogs, at least to an extent, to try to get some reward for all of one’s efforts.

Thanks for such an interesting contribution!

For me the easy answer is to post more spanking porn and spanking goodies from popular culture. I know I’ve gone too commercial for many tastes, but if I wasn’t making a bit of coin, I don’t think I’d still be enthusiastic enough to be posting after seven years.

Blogging has indeed lost some of its social sparkle; I get many fewer comments than I used to. I think people are indeed conducting their social interactions more on the social networking sites than in blog comments, as they may have done formerly.

And, for what it’s worth, I’ve long used a two-month rule for pruning links — if I notice a site hasn’t been updated in two months, the link usually goes. I do make exceptions, but usually only for “elders” who’ve been at this many and many a year, like me.