Blogging may be hazardous to your health
That’s the theme of a New York Times story, In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
There’s no doubt that running a decent blog is a lot of work and blogging for a living must really be a lot of work. Even this rather modest blog with no advertising requires a large amount of time and effort. It isn’t just the gathering and sifting of information or the writing of new material. There’s also a lot of administrative stuff- updating software, fighting spammers, trying to prevent rampant plagiarism, and so on.
The NY Times article was probably triggered by the recent deaths of three well-known bloggers but many in the blogosphere think it’s overdone. Larry Dignan at ZDNet writes:
Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents? Any job where you gnash your teeth together? We write for a living, yap all day and don’t have to wear suits. You could do worse than blogging.
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