The sedentary blogger

I visited my Mom's yesterday. My sister-in-law came, too, and we sat around and exchanged blogging stories.

One thing that filled me with dismay was when my mom started talking about blogging comment etiquette. If somebody leaves a comment on your blog, you leave a comment on theirs, and if you want to drum up a lot of hits on your blog, comment on lots of people's blogs.

Then she told a story about a lady who had been real active in the blogging community, who suddenly went AWOL for a while. And people were leaving her nasty comments because she hadn't posted on their blogs in so long. Turns out she had had a family emergency and just hadn't been around a computer.

This story filled me with horror. I used to run a fairly large videogame website, and talking to whiny people was what I did, day in and day out. Most of them being hormone-ridden teenagers didn't help matters. And the trouble was, I HAD to talk to them because half the time something on MY site was giving them trouble.

I ran that site almost ten years. I still have what you might call "web admin burnout". I have no desire to go back to being at the beck and call of the general public, no matter how nice they are.

Blogging, for me, is a nice, small way to have a website with no strings attached.

But this blogger etiquette thing would make me dump this blog faster than you could say "flame war". So if you comment here, and I don't go to your blog and comment, it's nothing personal. I'm just very sedentary when it comes to blogging. I can't handle the social demands of an active internet life again.