BLOGGER'S A BITCH

I'VE BEEN AWAY FROM BLOGGING FOR THE ENTIRE WEEKEND OR MORE, BUSY WITH OTHER PURSUITS THAT, AS IT TURNED OUT, SADLY ENDED IN THE CONCLUSION OF THAT PURSUIT.

And as I return from casting my line into the water to see what I might try to reel in, one of my e-mails is from an astute and very intelligent female friend and potential blogger who sends this along.

It may or may not apply to your own feeling on blogging and what it means or doesn't mean to you. For the moment, as I contemplate other things, I throw it out to you and ask:

How often do you blog, as opposed to how often you'd LIKE to blog, and is that enough for you or too much or somewhere in between?

And do you sometimes find yourself posting something just to keep up or because you've really got something to say? IS there something like the Blogger Blahs or the Blogger Blues?

No Day at the Beach
Bloggers Struggle With What to Do About Vacation
By ELIZABETH HOLMES

A banner stripped across the top of the Daily Dish declares that the popular Web log's host, Andrew Sullivan, has "gone fishing." Mr. Sullivan declared a two-week vacation and opted to leave his political blog behind.

Several thousand of his readers have done the same.

Despite the efforts of three verbose guest bloggers, replacements handpicked by Sullivan, the site's visitor tally has fallen. The Daily Dish, now part of Time magazine, usually garners around 90,000 unique visitors, or individual readers, each day.

At the start of the first work week without him, Sullivan's blog received about 67,000 hits, according to Site Meter. This week, traffic has hovered around 57,000.

"The frequency of emails of 'Bring back Andrew' and 'This is stupid. Bring back Andrew' is definitely higher than anything I've ever written," says David Weigel, a 24-year-old assistant editor at Reason magazine, one of Sullivan's guest bloggers.

In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families.

Those brave enough to detach themselves from their keyboards for a few days must choose between leaving the site dormant or having someone blog-sit.

To be sure, most bloggers don't agonize over this decision. Of the 12 million bloggers on the Internet, only about 13% post daily, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even fewer -- 10% -- spend 10 or more hours a week on their blogs.

Yet for the sliver of people whose livelihood depends on the blog -- whether they are conservative, liberal or don't care -- stepping away from the keyboard can be difficult.

Unlike other jobs, where co-workers can fill in for an absent employee, blogs are usually a one-person show. A blogger's personality carries the site. When the host isn't there, readers tend to stray.

August is a slow time for all blogs, but having an absent host makes the problem worse. Lose enough readers, and advertisers are sure to join the exodus.

It's something that John Amato, host of the political blog Crooks and Liars, knows all too well. Amato rarely steps away from his site for any significant amount of time, although he finds updating the page multiple times a day exhausting.

"You become your blog," says Mr. Amato, whose site gets an average of 150,000 hits a day. "It's John Amato. They're used to John Amato."

Some bloggers thrive on the manic pace. Getaways for Jim Romenesko, host of the popular media blog bearing his name, consist of a Friday afternoon drive every month or so from his home in the Chicago suburbs to visit friends in Milwaukee.

The 85-mile trip should last around 90 minutes. For Romenesko, it takes nearly four hours -- because he stops at eight different Starbucks on the way to update his site.

The longest Mr. Romenesko has refrained from posting on his site, which gets about 70,000 hits a day, was for one week three years ago on the insistence of site owner, the Poynter Institute. He hasn't taken a vacation in seven years.

"The column's called Romenesko," he says. "I just feel it should be Romenesko" who writes it.

While it may seem like a chore to outsiders, many bloggers enjoy the compulsion. Mark Lisanti, who runs the entertainment gossip blog Defamer, is much like Romenesko in his no-vacation tendencies.

Although he gets three weeks off each year from Gawker Media, which owns the site, he rarely takes a day. Not because he can't, he just doesn't want to. "My plan is to die face down on the desk in the middle of a post," Lisanti jokes.

Kevin Drum, author of Washington Monthly's blog Political Animal, says he used to have that kind of proprietary attitude. At some point, says, "You just have to let go."