Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

Day 25 – Gone Hiking….

May 25, 2008 at 8:03 am | In 31 Day Comment Challenge, Blogging, Dr. Kirsti A. Dyer, Ruminations Blog, comment08 | No Comments
Tags: 31 Day Comment Challenge, blog, blog burnout, blog fatigue, comment08, Education Blogging, Education Blogs

The task for the day is to Take a Break. I saw this before today and decided to set something up in advance to take the day off (which is nice because it’s in the middle of a three day weekend).

This image of sitting on top of a mountain is perfect for my Take a Break day.

Day 25 Activity – Taking a Break

The task for Day 25 was to take a day of total rest. No pressure to comment. No reason to do anything on your computer at all if you don’t want to. Just relax. But perhaps most of all the comforting reminder that “We’ll be here when you get back.”

Reflections and Revelations

On Day 16, I opted to take A Day to Breathe & Catch Up. Taking a day to just do something fun, like finding an incredible mountain view to post was a great break.

Image Source: Muris Kuloglija Kula Asja. Sarajevo under fog. Royalty Free Use.

This blog post is part of The Comment Challenge, comment08.

Blog Overload, Blog Fatigue & Blog Burnout / Day 21 Make a Recommendation

May 21, 2008 at 10:39 pm | In 31 Day Comment Challenge, Blogging, Ruminations Blog, comment08 | 6 Comments
Tags: 31 Day Comment Challenge, blog, blog burnout, blog fatigue, comment08, Education Blogging, Education Blogs

I made the realization yesterday that while the 31 Day Comment Challenge has been a great learning experience, it has also been a bit more of a challenge than I thought it would be and realizing that I am devoting way more than 10 minutes to research and write a blog post.

I got to thinking about what leads to blogging overload, blog fatigue and blogging burnout and was wondering where I might be on the spectrum.

Blogging<——>Blog Overload<——>Blog Fatigue<——>Blog Burnout——> Blog RIP

These were some of the best definitions that I could come up with for these terms:

Blog Overload -When the blogger gets overloaded either by 1.) daily posts to his or her own blog or 2.) keeping up with reading and responding to blogs.

Blog Fatigue – When blogging becomes a challenge and the blogger gets tired of daily blogging and decides to take a break.

Blog Burnout – When blogging becomes too much of a chore or becomes a burden and the blogger decides to stop blogging altogether.

Five Stages of Blogging According to Kent Newsome and Jason Kaneshiro, The Five Stages of Blogging:

1. Excitement: While setting up a new blog, the blogger is full of great ideas, is inspired, and expectations are high.
2. Expectation: When starting from zero, little things mean a lot and progress seems exponential.
3. Frustration: Blogging meet diminishing returns, turns into inefficient work, and the blogger finds it harder and harder to get attention amid the multitude of other blogs.
4. Alienation: Rejection of the blogosphere.
5. Abandonment: A dead blog.

Paul Kedrosky offered the following insights as to why blog fatigue happens:

There are likely as many reasons as there are bloggers, but chief among them is the insidious way that blogging goes from a diversion to an obligation.

Consider: Many people start blogging because they think it’s a useful replacement for sending things around on mailing lists to friends.

The trouble is, most of the people reading such blogs are not friends, so bloggers start worrying that these people won’t understand when they take a few days (or weeks) off from sending things around.

Paul Kedrosky offered the following insights as to whether blog fatigue will ever go away:

Probably not. The economics of blogging (for most bloggers) will never be such that they can count on a large stream of income flowing in as a result of their musings. Those people are always going to be at risk for blog fatigue, if mostly because they inevitably wonder just what the heck they are doing this for.

They will either decide to

1.) Blog on their own schedule, not that of some imagined reader, or 2. ) Become “blog wood” — one of the myriad abandoned blogs floating around in the blogosphere’s many currents.

Preventing Blogging Burnout

Ideally I’d like to keep myself from getting Blogging Burnout, becoming one of the many abandoned blogs and ending up as ‘blog wood” or a Blog RIP (Rest in Peace) on the Blog Reaper. (The Blog Reaper publishes a blog of obituaries on dead blogs.)

Continue reading Blog Overload, Blog Fatigue & Blog Burnout / Day 21 Make a Recommendation…