If you left your car alongside the road, it would be towed, you be ticketed and would be responsible for getting your vehicle out of the impound. So, why shouldn't there be repercussions for abandoning your blog?
When writers establish blogs, they are taking on a commitment. Bloggers make promises to their readers (which may only be their moms, spouses or strangers who also have the same predilection for silent movies, musty old books and New Wave music from the 1980s). Creating a blog is making a promise to deliver timely content updates. When bloggers fail to update their blogs, they fail their readers.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which operates a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks were updated in the 120 days prior to the survey, which means about 95 percent of blogs were abandoned. It is estimated that about 40,000 people a day start a blog with many of those blogs being abandoned after one or two posts.
If you are not going to stick with it, why go to the trouble of picking a host service, customizing a fashionable blog theme and creating content? Writing a poem or painting a picture would be a more efficient and successful use of your brief burst of creative energy. Why waste your time and disappoint your readers (in particular me) when your zany fashion tidbits, unusual recipes with Huckleberry and wacky advice columns are not longer updated regularly. There is no need to clutter my Blogger Reading List with your lackluster dream that no longer captures your imagination; it is too much of an emotional roller coaster to become a devoted blog follower only to return to my favorite blogs to find stale posts floating in cyberspace.
If you are not going to update your blog, the polite thing to do is either to delete it, or write a short statement such as "Under Construction." "Thanks for stopping by. Be sure to stop by later." "No longer blogging, but please enjoy my archive.” "Too damn busy to update my blog with pictures of smiling kids and clever anecdotes about their mispronunciations that sound like dirty words.” Or, “My blog is a suckish graveyard."
Really any of those would work and would save you from being permanently exiled from my Blogger Dashboard.
