Death! By Blogging! With A Herri... *ahem*

Death by blogging! Overwerked jerks! OMG dont blog, leave news to the professionals!

The amount of pure schmitt-schtirring in this article is mind boggling, never mind blogging. It's not so much the good shit as pure.

"Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind."

Yeah yeah. I write for Helium occasionally, also for several other pay per piece blogs, write on my own blogs, and keep up with a fairly full life in Second Life - which is blogging in 3D once you get a sim of your own. (Like my little island of Catsylvania...) The sim costs me $75/month, and the blogs, well none of them have gone over the point where a payment would be triggered. Big deal.

You want blogs, you support them. Click the damn links, follow a Google ad. It's that simple. It's like clapping someone on the shoulder and saying "good job!" One clap on the shoulder is just that - but if everyone does it, you end up with a concrete confidence boost for the blogger.

And bloggers - if you want to blog, don't expect to get paid for it. I only know a tiny handful of diarists of the last few centuries who got published. (And some of them, only posthumously. Don't let that be you...) You're keeping a diary. An extremely valuable (no doubt) and incisive (obviously) and relevant (of course) diary, but that's what a blog is. A diary.

And just as some people's musings turned into newspapers and magazines and books, so perhaps your blog might pupate and turn into a multimedia butterfly. But by then you're out of the territory of diaries and into the world of publishing. And I can't even begin to count the number of newspaper, magazine, and publishing people who have died of stress and/or one of the many other perils of their particular lines of work. And THEY had a whole organisation backing them.

So let's get it straight Mr MATT RICHTEL (his all-capitalisation, not mine...) of the New York Times - it's not *bloggers* who are dying of stress, they're your fellows in journalism and publishing. They are no longer a diarist sitting at their blog, they are journalists and publishers and editors. If it walks like a duck quacks like a duck and floats, it's a duck. And don't let it stress you too much...