Over the weekend, three of my close friends forwarded a New York Times story on Blogging. The title of the story says it all. Here is the link:

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

At first I thought there was a message in there for me. I cross-checked and found that it was only because the story made some references to some of the topics covered in my next book.

Writer Matt Richtel references how blog fatigue may have been the cause of death for two prominent bloggers Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant. Matt also interviews other celebrity bloggers like Matt Buchanan, Om Malik and Michael Arrington. All the bloggers (all of these people are super-smart without a doubt) interviewed corroborated with the story and helped conclude that “Blogging fatigue can be serious”

At a very high-level, any addiction is dangerous. Too much of anything is bad. That I agree. However, the generalization across the board may be stretching it a bit.

One way to categorize blogs is based on two factors:
1) shelf-life of the content
2) importance of the content

What Matt is referring to is one type of blogs that have content that is “higher on the importance and time sensitivity” and “lower on the shelf-life”. This is a category I call “vertical news”. Bloggers in this category are celebrity journalists in a vertical space. In this case, all of them happen to be in the technology space. They have to be on the run all the time because all the rules that apply to journalism apply here but without the resources that are available to big name news bureaus. Obviously there is a lot of stress in the business.

The other types of bloggers have the stress but nothing of the order of what you see in this category.

Have a great week ahead.