by May Monten

Created on: March 09, 2009   Last Updated: February 10, 2010

Blogging is fun, but it has its dark side. It can become addictive and eat up too much of your time. It can even get you into trouble in the real world.

Blogging has a seductive pull, one that can turn into an addiction.. There is always one more post you could write, one more picture you could display, one more tweak you'd love to make to your template. A blogger's work, to paraphrase an old saying, is never done.

It's easy to fall into the trap of obsessing over your stats. There are so many ways to get information about your visitors. There have always been site meters you could place on your blog and stat charts that you could read if you had a self-hosted sites. Now there is also Google Analytics, which is a program so complicated and with such an overwhelming amount of information, that just learning how to use it becomes its own time sink.

But the lure of the stats is strong. Every hit is someone who read your blog. Every link is someone who liked your site enough to recommend it to the world. Every search engine referral is a sign that your blog has what people are looking for. How seductive is that!

The problem, of course, is that minutes spent working on your blog and looking at your stats can easily stretch into hours, and those are hours that you may need to be spending doing something else. It's easy to become so absorbed in blogging that you start to neglect critical areas of your life. That's why the seduction of blogging needs to be resisted if it threatens to take over too much of your time. For some true addicts, that may not be possible, and going cold turkey may be the only way to bring their lives back into balance.

The other major danger with blogging is that it can get you into trouble.  People have complained about their jobs or their bosses on their personal blogs, and when their bosses found out, the bloggers were fired. Just because you are writing on a personal blog doesn't mean that the whole world can't see it. Be discreet.

Similarly, complaining about your relationship can get you into trouble for obvious reasons, as can boasting about extra-marital affairs. Bloggers may think they are safe if they have disguised their names, but bloggers who write personal blogs often inadvertently reveal enough information about themselves that people who know them in real life will recognize them in their blogs.

Blogging, then, is a bad idea for people who can't resist putting the personal details of their lives in a place where the whole world can see, and it's a bad idea for people who aren't able to manage their time well and resist blogging's never-ending seductive pull. And yet, millions of people start blogging for the first time every day. For some, it will be a richly rewarding experience. Others will curse the day that they wrote their first post.

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