Quite an interesting comment thread going on over here. The artist formerly known as The Creator of Worlds passes along some insights on what drives someone to quite blogging, which I greatly fear may come to pass at Protein Wisdom. The whole thread is worthwhile, but here are a couple of wheat grains hidden in the chaff:

Well, YJP, in the blogosphere (and Christ, there’s a word I hate—like “fisking"), higher rankings mean better ad revenue, and rankings are a product of more than just quality product. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.

I blew off the Washington Post awards and, from the perspective of building a readership, that was a mistake.

Re: these contests. Well, you and I have talked about this before, so you know I hate these things. But IÂ’m terrible at marketing, and these things are ways to market the site. So as much as I hate it, I have to do it.

Makes me sick to ask people to go vote for me everyday. Seriously. I feel dirty. But if I am unable to make this thing pay for itself, I canÂ’t justify doing it daily. So IÂ’m learning to whore myself a little bit. Reluctantly.

Right now I’m at that, “hey, you don’t look that slutty in fish nets” point.

Posted by Jeff Goldstein

And this one:

It took Allah almost ten months to totally burn out and quit blogging after winning last year, Jeff.

No, it took Allah three months to totally burn out. The seven months after that were a mix of shitty, boring Photoshops and straightforward snoozefest warblogging to keep up my traffic.

Here’s how it’s gonna go down, Jeff. Sometime in April or maybe early May, you’re going to be sitting there with that Martha Stewart diary template open, your mind a complete blank. And suddenly you’ll think, “I’ve done it. I’ve done every muff-dive joke known to man. There’s nowhere left to go.” So you’ll say ah, well, fuck it, no more Martha Stewart ‘shops. But then here’s what’ll happen: Martha will get paroled or she’ll get in a fight in the prison commissary or something, and suddenly everyone and their fucking mother will be e-mailing you saying, “Dude, you HAVE GOT to ‘shop this. The earth itself cries out for it.” And you’ll start sweating again ‘cause just about the last fucking thing in the world you’ll want to do at that point is tap out another Stewart piece. Maybe you’ll do it anyway. Or, just maybe, you’ll start wondering the same thing I wondered when I eventually got to this point: namely, could booting up the old Sega and replaying Sonic The Hedgehog all the way through really be a worse use of my time than this? And the answer is: no. No, it could not.

The moment I finally knew for sure that quitting was the right thing to do was when Arafat was in that he’s dead/he’s not dead limbo. The demand for agonizingly cliched Arafat/"Weekend at Bernie’s” ‘shops was at an all-time high. And you know and I know and everyone else knows damn well who would have been expected to provide the supply, were he still blogging at the time. The horror. The horror.

I want to assure you that when your Sonic The Hedgehog moment comes, IÂ’ll be there for you. Game paddle in hand.

Posted by Allah

The above comment prompted this reply from Jeff:

That’s beautiful, Allah. But c’mon—how does one ever run out of muff diving jokes? Seriously. It that even possible?

Posted by Jeff Goldstein

Posted by: Physics Geek at 08:00 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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