Blaming and Blogging

My brother responded to the last post, in which I reminded everyone about his Pan Mass Challenge bike ride to raise money for cancer research, and asked him to post the address for anyone who wants to donate to him online. He wisely suggested that I give the address in a blog post, since many people might see that the comment came from him and just stop reading.


So, if you are interested in donating to my brother's ride (and I encourage you to do so), here's the web address:


http://www.pmc.org/egifts/MM0386


Thanks for your support, and for helping cancer research.


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A friend sent me a link for an interesting web site called BlameDrewsCancer.com. About a month ago, a blogger named Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and set up this site. As the site says, ever since the day he was diagnosed, he has blamed everything on his cancer: "Losing his keys, misplacing his wallet, the Phillies losing, etc." His site allows other people, via Twitter, to send in anything that they want to blame on Drew's cancer. So far, he's had almost 7000 people blame over 10,000 things on his cancer.


I certainly understand that impulse. I don't necessarily blame things on my cancer, but I use it as a convenient excuse. I'd really like my wife to get better at using that excuse, too, so when people ask her if I can help with things, she can get me out of volunteering. ("Do you think Bob can help build sets for the ballet recital?" "No, sorry. He's busy....battling cancer.") Goodness knows it's gotten me out of some committee assignments at work.


Anyway, Drew's blaming cance isn't just therapuetic; he's hoping to get someone to sponsor the site so that every time someone blames something on his cancer, a donation is made to Make a Wish or the American Cancer Society or some similar organization.

Good luck, Drew.


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Speaking of bloggers like Drew (and me).....


The New York Times had an interesting article last week on blogging. According to the Times piece, a company called Technorati (which runs a search engine for blogs) did a survey of existing blogs, and found that "only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled. "


Fascinating. And not surprising. I've encountered plenty of blogs that had some great promise, but which were abandonded pretty quickly, and never de-activated. (Long-time readers may recall that I had really hoped to call this blog Lymphomaniac, but found that the name was taken by someone who started a blog with that name. He wrote one past about thinking that he had lymphoma, then another saying he'd found out he didn't have it, and so abandoned the blog after two posts. But the name is still his.)


The Times article puts some emphasis on the commercial nature of blogs: people thought they would make some cash through advertising, only to find that while they had readers, no one wanted to click on the ads. Others found that ranting online seemed like a great idea, but that the people they were ranting about had access to their blogs, which made things kind of messy. And maybe some people who used to blog are now going the way of Facebook and Twitter -- still ranting, but only a sentence or two at a time.


I still find the whole blogging thing to be both fun and useful. My audience has changed over time, which is itself pretty interesting: if you look at early entries, there were lots of people who commented that I know don't even read anymore. And then along the way, I picked up readers that I've never met before, who have found some information about fNHL from me. There have certainly been some constants -- family and friends.

I guess I never saw the blog as a way to make money, or as just a place to rant. I write for others, not myself, though I do use it as a kind of diary, I guess. (I've written some entries that I never published, because I talked about stuff that would worry my mother unnecessarily. But the writing of them was therapeutic in itself, even if I didn't see them published.) For a writing teacher, it's a pretty cool exercise, balancing the needs of m,ultiple audiences with my own needs. So it's been satisfying on a number of levels.


Anyway, I'll keep writing, even if 95% of my blogging colleagues have gone and quit. I don't know the official numbers, but I'm guessing it's close to 5% of fNHL patients that are diagnosed at my age, so I'm comfortable with being in that kind of "elite" percentile.

(A special note to one of you: I used "in which" on purpose, just for you.)