Comments on: Failures may not be

By: walt crawford

walt crawford — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:05:55 +0000

Both useful expansions. My primary focus here was actually institutional blogs rather than personal blogs, and I think the stakes may be a little different–although, again, a blog is primarily a failure if (a) the blogger/institution believes it to be a failure or (b) the blogger/institution states (or sets out) explicit goals and the blog utterly fails to deliver–and the blogger or institution doesn’t learn anything from the lack of success. “Losing interest” (perhaps the most common cause of blogs not being updated) may be a slightly different issue for publicized institutional blogs than for personal blogs…

By: stevenb

stevenb — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 04:54:52 +0000

I don’t think time of existence or number of subscribers/readers or comments are metrics for measuring blog success/failure. Whether it’s a success or failure depends on what the bloggers objectives were at the start of the blog. If the objective/outcome was to get readers engaged in a topic and no one read the blog – yeah, that suggests failure. So shut down that blog and create another one if you are persistent. But if your objective was to bring attention to an often ignored or unrecognized issue, the blogger might achieve the outcome in a few months and then decide they met their goal and have no point in going forward. I think ultimately librarians will start a blog because they think they have something to communicate and that others will think it worthwhile. Once it stops being fun or a challenge and starts being a chore, I think that’s when folks will call it a day – and that’s not a fail – just a decision to move on.

By: eddie

eddie — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:13:41 +0000

One of my favourite blogs that ‘ended’ was http://www.everythingispointless.com and Lou Savva stopped when he thought it was complete.
A kind of closure, actually.