Blogscapes

I came across this unsettling albeit interesting article on NY Times online” In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop . 

The article talks about professional bloggers who blog away at home almost non-stop as they are paid by the posts, many of whom are suffering. There have been two casualties so far: Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack just two weeks ago, and another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary in December. Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

One common area between them is that they blog about one of the most competitive categories inblogging, which is ”about technology developments and news”. There is a ”vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes”.

Many other bloggers also mention they have ”weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet”.

With more money and influence found online, it looks like this scary trend is set to rise?

Perhaps, there should be a mandatory rest period for time-out and exercise that could be in built into all blog hosts, so that bloggers are reminded to focus on something else every half an hour!