Where blogs go to die

When a blog falls in the woods, and nobody reads it, is it still a blog?

While writing my MA project, I keep returning to the idea of the blog as a writing process, or as an extrusion of a thought process. The temporality of writing is at the forefront. Blogging has emergent properties, growing out of simple, single-topic lexias, into complex structures that depict the direction, thoughts, ideas and interests of a writer (or several writers).

As a sidedish to this thought, I've been thinking about what happens to blogs when they die. And I'm starting to think that blogs lose their inherent blogness when they are no longer being posted to. If I were to cut the thread, disable comments, and let this thing wither on the stalk, it's just a biggish collection of hypertextual short prose of considerable genre impurity. But it's not a blog. Hyphenating things up a bit: blogs are defined by their coming-into-being, their being-in-time. By the fact that they never close the doors and lock up, becoming unified "works." They refuse to be completely empirical objects of study, not unlike their writers, and when they lose their forward momentum, I would argue that they no longer quite fit the description of what I've come to think of as blogs.

That's why I don't think its a coincidence that the word "blog" is both the noun and the verb.

Or, as Woody Allen put it: "blogs, I think, are like a shark. They have to keep moving, or they die. And I think that what we got on our hands here is a dead shark."