Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

> there are all sorts of benefits to blogging besides making original contributions to exposition of a topic. And even though I realize this, I still get stuck a lot on the non-originality thing.

Part of the problem is that many people see blogging as a teaching tool alone. More often than not, it's a conversation starter too, and the blogger ends up learning a great deal of new information in the process.

And even if you wish to be only a teacher with your blog, there is also a bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at play here. You think, what's the point of me explaining X? Everyone knows about X, probably better than me. Others wrote about X.

In truth, you'll find that more often than not plenty of people don't know about X. The way you'd describe and explain X may actually lead people to acquire a new prospective on the subject.

I've abandoned several blogs. No, I'm not happy about this.

Why abandon a blog that I've put a great deal of time, even years, into?

For me, it comes down to few things, but mainly a work vs reward measuring. Doing a good (or even decent) blog takes a lot of work. I'm honestly not the best writer in the world, and creating a blog that's on topic consistently and creating that amount of rich content is just hard.

I found my traffic was always good if I could blog at least 3x/week, but really 1x/day was the very best. Even if you're doing that by sitting down and queuing up content for the week, that's a lot of effort (generally an entire day) just to blog consistently.

What I always wanted to do, was to get together a group blog with 5-10 friends, which we could all contribute to on some semi-consistent topic (like Mashable, Techcrunch, etc but smaller in scope and goal). Then each person doing 1-2 things a week would be totally sufficient and keep things interesting.

Yet, the reward for this was always pretty low. I didn't like putting ads on my site. Amazon referral links were pretty good on occasion, but if you don't have a product oriented blog (or huge traffic) it still barely paid for hosting. So 1 day/week (15% of your time) for that much coming back to me was pretty low.

This is a great concept... I think where it could differentiate itself is by aggregating posts by topic. If I'm searching some topic on the web, I often come across blogs that are out of date or orphaned, and they might provide me with some of the information or links I am looking for, but not all.

If Postary lets me find several such blogs on its site, organized into blog threads by topic, then it fills a need on both sides: the author gets to broadcast to the web without the pressure of maintaining a blog site or Twitter feed, etc... and the reader is able to find information or commentary on a topic of interest.

It could be almost like a message board, instead of thread topics there are topics (several of which might apply to any given Postary post) and instead of responses to that topic, a threaded view of Postary posts. The threaded view would be composed on-the-fly and would vary depending on what you search for.

To make it more interesting and engaging, each Postary could have the option of being maintained as a blog if the writer so wished... and further, each Postary could allow comments from readers.

So you could post your thoughts about Haskell the day you discover and get really excited by it; and that could be tagged under topics like Haskell, programming philosophy, programming tips, etc. If somebody searched Postary for Haskell, they would see your post along with all others on the same topic, plus comments, plus follow-on posts (if any) by the same author. Threads could be auto-composed based on any number of criteria (newest first, most-responded-to first, etc.)

In this way, the site could serve both the "web archaeology" and "latest and greatest info" niches of search, and could create a lighter, less pressured form of engagement with authors and readers. Isolated, sporadic posting by authors could be organized into a coherent, constantly-updated site on any number of topics.

Because I realized that 99% of what I want to write about is textual flatulence to the rest of the world, and I got tired of the narcissism inherent in that 99%.

I do keep 3 bloggy things, but 2 only get updated with useful info, and the other is where I mumble about my personal life (which no one but me cares about generally).

Thanks for the feedback. We did this in 8-10 hours - we left a lot out :)

The difference I guess is that we tried to create a blogging service that isn't a blog you need to maintain to feel good about.