Duncan Riley writes about the Blog Burnout and offers a simple solution for professional bloggers as one easy lesson: take the weekend off. The Probloggers usually have a 7 day week if they maintain a blog as major source for their income or add the blogging on weekends on top of their 5 or 6 day workshift. For those who do it privately and free, the idea of taking the weekend off is not a major problem, but for those others it’s a problematic situation:

…when you don’t blog you lose traffic and if your chasing money as well, you potentially lose revenue.

In the end, I believe everyone must find his/her own best-working practise to solve this riddle about keeping blogging, life and work under one banner – being yourself.

That’s it! I simply checked the stats of my Blogspirit account and figured that 354MB traffic was way too much. I wondered why, since I know my blog won’t be read by that many users. However, the statistics list revealed yet another sad truth: Robots crawl my site as if a stampede would race over the server. Both Googlebot and Slurp create more than 200MB, and the robots create roughly 78% of the traffic in total! This is way too much, and I’d like to ask for some support here. I already modified the META for robots to „index,nofollow“ and revisit-after to „7 days“, but a robot.txt file to specifically exclude aggressive spider robots or the ability to edit the .htaccess for more usability to ban certain IP Addresses from spamming would really help… Philippe, Thomas? That’s how I made my 300th blog entry, and I’d like to continue still… ;)

Why would I consider blogs as „Weapons of Mass Destruction“? Originally, there’s simply the issue that the author of a blog may influence the life of certain people – especially those who’ve been targetted by the author. Remember the case of Citizen-Media-Ethos in which Eason Jordan was bound to a statement concerning US troops in Iraq infront of a small internal journalist group, but one has been a blogger without affiliance to the Mainstream-Media or any Multinational Corporation. This fact about the hidden and often underestimated power of blog authors made me name this blog Sichelputzer with the subtitle of „Weapons of Mass Destruction“ (seen in the layout image). But blogs as „Weapons of Mass Destruction“ are certainly effecting different topics such as:

Infected Blogs
…which unleash trojans, keyloggers or viruses by utilizing the often provided diskspace to save malicious files and prepare them for an automated download in the HTML of the weblog. Usually the infected blog is being promoted by using the most simple idea: spam mails. On the other hand one should ask why people still grant permission to auto-install software via the internet explorer or visit spam mail related websites… please, stupidity is no excuse.

Censored Blogs
…which is commonly done in China and other countries which fear the truth and non-governmental-controlled media. But even a democratic country like Spain plans to censor the internet and especially blogs. Now the idea to study in a spanish language specialization for my International Management study seems to be oblivious.

(Un)Censored Blogs
…which is explained by a recent voting poll by the US webhosting-company Hostway: 80 percent of a total of 2500 participants in this poll expressed that blog authors should not publish third-party information. Nevertheless, about 52 percent of the participants support the idea of granting private journalists (blog authors) the same rights as traditional and official journalists have – only 27% had no independent opinion on the subject.