How Long Do Blogs Live?

How long do blogs live?

Well, the most successful ones outgrow the name “blog” – they become websites. The Huffington Post started as a blog, for example, but it sure seems like a full-blown media outlet now.

And then there are all those short-lived one- or two-post specials. Someone said, “Let me blog!” and they started and then abruptly never posted again.

I've always heard that three years is the average lifespan of the blog. Balancing the HuffPos and the singular blips in the blogosphere, that seems about right. Heck, I have at least four blogs (yes, I lost track), including a project dedicated to discarded weather-worn umbrellas (Umbrellacide) and a brief celebration of the lives of recently-deceased poets (We Lost a Poet).

My original success as a blogger came with the autobiographical BillyBlog, which I associate with Hurricane Katrina, having started around the same time and, it is still lingering on life support, chalking up one or two posts a year. [I wrote this in a word document, and felt it most appropriate to post here, where it all started.]

BillyBlog gave birth to Tattoosday, an idea that outgrew its initial weekly inkiling, and became my most successful blog. It’s even part of my Facebook identity.

But something happened to Tattoosday, back in August 2012. I stopped posting whereas previously I posted daily and felt like an abject failure if I failed to do so.

I lost my job around the same time, and you would have thought that would have spurred a flurry of activity, but it didn't.

It looked like Tattoosday had a second wind in early 2013, but again, the summer seemed to kill it.

Ask my family – I wouldn't go anywhere without my notebook and Tattoosday fliers promoting the site. I ran out of fliers and haven’t reprinted. I only occasionally have my book with me and, despite still conducting the occasional interview, I still have material from five months ago, in June, that remains unpublished. 

How’s this for perspective: at its peak, I posted daily, seven times a week. In contrast, since I started my new job in September after a year out of work, I have posted just seven times. And I can’t tell you exactly why.

September marked our sixth anniversary.

I have spent more time wondering why I’m not writing Tattoosday than I have spent time writing Tattoosday.

My words fail me.

It is not that I am less interested in tattoos – I still jump at the chance to talk to people about them. I am guessing it is more just that, as I grow older, and have shifted focus onto a new job, I am focused on other things, things so mundane it is not even worth mentioning in a blog post.

So, I do not know what will happen with Tattoosday. I would like to think that I will keep posting, that I just need that spark to reignite the blogger fire within me. Right now, there are a few embers, smoldering. I have no idea what will happen – if the Tattoosday fire will blaze again, or if it will go out, quietly, with a thin white wisp of smoke, vanishing into the blogosphere.

The Yin and Yang of Spinoff Blogs

Well, despite the fact that Tattoosday suffers on rainy days, it's sister blog, Umbrellacide, flourishes. And vice versa. It rained all day today.

Go see some of the carnage from Manhattan and Brooklyn here. Enough posts to last a few days.

Introducing Umbrellacide, Another Spin-Off

Remember the month of March, when I had that cockamamie idea to take pictures of discarded umbrellas after rain storms and post them here on BillyBlog?

"Silly blogger," I could hear people saying, "that's an idea that wears thin very quickly".

True that, even for the guy drawing stares from normally jaded New Yorkers. "Why the hell (or other four-letter word) is that guy taking a picture of that broken umbrella?"

But, like a splinter stuck under a toenail, I couldn't shake it. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Behold:

Umbrellacide


Now it's its own stand-alone blog. No poetry, book reviews, kooky photographs or gratuitous soccer-dad posts. Just umbrellas. Maybe a clever title here and there. But mainly umbrellas. Usually broken. Never to be opened again. This is their final resting place (figuratively).

Tell your friends. Link it to your sites. Send me your own umbrella corpse pictures.

Thank you for your time.

Umbrellacide III: Spring Edition

Don't worry, just a couple of what I think are artistic shots:


And I like this one with some spring colors in the background:

Umbrellacide II

It's the end of a long rainy day. You are tired. A gust of wind rips your umbrella from your hands and carries it down the street. You just want to go home. You've already let go once. You let go again. You sigh and turn away.

Umbrellacide: An Introduction

Umbrellas are one of humanity's unheralded inanimate objects. They shelter us from the elements, but they are disposable. They are left on trains, in shopping carts, or, if they weaken and buckle under the wrath of the elements, they are cast aside with only a grimace and a curse.

I have long considered posting the evidence of the scattered umbrella corpses after a storm. Now it is time.

First, a disclaimer. I am, in no way, claiming this is an original idea. A year or two ago, the New York Times featured a photo-collage of umbrella skeletons littering the city streets after a Nor'easter. I am experimenting. Feel free to comment on whether you find this enjoyable, interesting, or neither.

What possessed me to begin this venture at this time was getting caught yesterday, lacking umbrellas, on 86th Street in Brooklyn. I saw this woman struggling with an umbrella, in which, the lights were about to go out forever.


And this was not a dinky umbrella, but a rather sturdy one.



We moved on, and entered a store across the street. Fifteen minutes later, we exited and saw the previously wounded umbrella, abandoned on the sidewalk:


So, that was that, I was on a mission. A little while later, a snapped this shot, the umbrella lying lifeless next to a rubbish can, like a corpse resting next to a dumpster in an alley somewhere:

And later in the day, this sad soul was crushed lifeless in the middle of Third Avenue:


A different view:


And later, the morguelike close-up:


And thus concludes this first installment of Umbrellacide.