Will our blogs stop one day? Why did we start?

I have a short list of blogs I go through daily. All of them are blogs of friends. At one point or another, the frequency at which they post has either slowed or come to a stop. What I wonder, is what causes people to stop?

Everyone starts blogging for different reasons. Some people do it to stay in touch with friend, others do it for attention, there are even people out there that do it for money. But for the case of my friends around me that blog, they mostly post little blurbs of what they're doing online. For what reason did they start? and for what reason do they stop?

There are times when I haven't been able to post. Most of the time, I don't post because I've been too busy. Mainly because of labwork or heading out to all sort of events in my spare time. Quite often, I don't find the time to make the detailed thoughtful posts like I used to before becoming an official member of this lab. I still would like to write none the less when I do have time... but I do have a reason for writing.

For most of my friends that started blogging, it started as a social movement. It's something that friends did and online communities resulted from it. If you were to look at many blogs on the internet, you would find that most blogs have links to other blogs. Blogging is a social phenomena. For what reason do most people blog? I would say that most people start either to join social networks or for personal attention (not that personal attention is a bad thing, blogs are ment to be read!). Your friends would read your blog, sometimes they'd leave you a comment or even chat about what you've been posting. Blogging is about attention.

But what if one day, you were bored of the attention online? Perhaps after a while you were getting none? Would you still blog? It depends... if attention was what you wanted (or even, if you still wanted it). In the general cases, attention is why most people started and likely the same reason they stopped.

I started writing for different reasons. I started because I was inspired by other well thoughtout writers on the net and for reason that I wanted to improve my writing. I used to be a horrible writer before.

I have learned much about writing along the way. Writing is a tool to solidify incoherent inklings of ideas into something concrete. Most ideas that remain in my mind atleast, are exceptionally fleeting -- almost immediately gone when I start thinking about something else and they only subconsciously exist. Writing prevents that from happening. I have touched on this topic before.

There is more to blogging than just getting your ideas on to "paper" (or rather the "web" in this case), publishing online does force one to write more coherently that one would normally in say a notebook of random ideas. I know that what I post online will post one day be read by someone and what I write must make sense to others. In the case of my notebook, it just needs to make sense to me (and there are times when I look back at it, that even I can't tell what I was thinking before). Writing for me, is a way of refining ideas and offers me the opportunity to scrutinze them more closely than I would usualy if I were scribbling them into a book. This, to me, has been a very important feature to blogging.