Nobody gives a @#$% about your blog

This is the new shirt from DespairWear, and I thought it was apropos:

That’s how I feel about this site right now. Of the handful of regular readers I have, a small percentage actually comment. Both the comment % and total traffic here is steadily diminishing, and there’s no really good reason why. I don’t submit to Grand Rounds weekly like so many other bloggers do, because I actually have a personal standard that I maintain before I’d think someone else should feature my writing, but that’s another topic. Because of this, I don’t have that near-weekly resurgence in traffic and exposure that many other medbloggers take for granted.

Med blogs are popping up left and right, but there are also many that are dying on the vine, their authors obviously too busy or uninterested to keep up. I know I’ve been guilty of blogrot several times, but never for more than a month and not without at least an “update” post letting readers know I’m just in the weeds.

As I scan other sites, with a few notable exceptions, many are suffering diminished activity. Tiny Shrink voiced her complaint about this last week, and I replied in the comment section about my theory: Facebook. The last 2-3 weeks has seen an explosion of medbloggers on Facebook, and I think that whatever time that was left for blogging is being channeled there instead. After all, it’s a lot more fun to get and receive virtual tequila shots, have sheep thrown at you, or finding out if you’re the hottest in your circle of friends (survey says that I am not HOT, but I am smart ) than sitting down to the solitary activity of writing something. Compound this with getting hardly any comment feedback, and the incentive to write when you can just have fun/waste time dwindles.

Facebook is fun, but it doesn’t impact my blogging one way or the other because each satisfies a different purpose for me. Blogging isn’t as fun without the feedback, though.