Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an【36】Such bloggers often feel compelled to wr

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel uneasy if they don’t keep up. As they spend more time leaning over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes quietly so as not to call attention to their habit. The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger. com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs. Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades . Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people wri-ten so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter
    Research’s estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs. Indeed, if a blog is compared to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers are having conversations largely with themselves. Perhaps a chronically small audience is a blessing. For it seems that the more popular a blog becomes, the more some bloggers feel the need to post Mr. Pierce is a regular blogger who lives in Hollywood and works in the entertainment industry. He said blogging began to feel like an addiction when he noticed that he would rather be with his computer than with his girlfriend. "There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of snowball-rolling- down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum of several years’ posting becomes very keenly felt," he said. "And the absence of posting feels like—I don’t know, laziness or something."