Burnout in the blogosphere

Monday, April 07, 2008 by Dave Winer.

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselved to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.  

In the process I learned a lot about heart disease. It seems the Times didn't take the time to check with a doctor to see if the premise of the article was reasonable or even possible. Could you work yourself into a heart attack? Perhaps. But not in a year or two, it takes decades for heart disease to become symptomatic. They did autopsies of soldiers killed in the Korean War and found that many of them already had heart disease, some of them in their teens and early twenties. They wouldn't have known until they were in their forties, fifties or sixties, maybe even later. 

There were other reasons to hate the Times piece, but those were amply covered elsewhere.