Author John Biggs, who cranked 'em out for Techcrunch and Gizmodo, is quitting blogging. He writes about the things he's learned and earned generating 11,000 posts.
The first thing, of course, was the complete ruination of his health: he now "looks like a nervous beluga." But there are other perils—ambiguous ones, professional tradeoffs in the 3,300,000-word accumulation of mastery at something. You learn how to write fast and with dense precision, but it wrecks your ability to work long-form, to let a story unfold. You gain an uncanny awareness for what people want to read, but you can't remember what you want to read. You realize that while you're not really being read, authenticity works.
And you won't believe what happens next…
You learn that you can help people. In 2005 I wrote this post. It was about a WD-40 straw holder. It was a throwaway. A few months later I got a call. A nice lady was on the phone. She was trying to track me down. She said that the WD-40 straw holder post saved her company. She was able to sell hundreds of them and stay in business. I felt good for a minute and then wrote 16 more posts that day.
