It seems every blog post today last fortnight1 has to use the word “malaise” so I might as well chime in. What tipped me over the edge was seeing the comment:

Scoble and Mike – get a life. You peaked.

What’s really amazing about that comment isn’t just that it’s mean and inconsiderate, but that I came across it by reading Robert’s link blog. He’s actually publicizing criticism of himself. Frankly, I wouldn’t be big enough to do that. Maybe A-List bloggers are as stuck up as people tend to assume they are, but I suspect most of them are just normal people that everyone else keeps putting up on a pedestal. I certainly found Robert friendly and approachable when I met him the other week. People need to stop assuming that a link from an A-List blogger is going to make or break their business. The fact is, getting a link from an A-List blogger isn’t as big a deal as you think and it just takes the fun out of it for the A-List bloggers:

I’ve been in a blog malaise lately. It’s getting harder and harder to write. Why? The stakes are going up. Not for me, I really don’t care. But for the people I’m writing about and who want access to my audience. When I started writing a blog back in 2000 there weren’t any startups. In fact, the news of that day was how the startup world was being cleaned out.

The thing is, the link from Robert Scoble to my blog delivered all of 12 people here. Just 12. There was just no impact on the normal traffic here. Even when my post was posted to his link blog there was no impact to the traffic. Heck, Andy delivered more traffic my way that week.

So my highly belated suggestion for anyone feeling burnt out from blogging – ignore the rest of the world, just blog for you. You only drive traffic when you’re passionate and engaged yourself – blogging just to help people out will be ignored.

1 – I've had this one sitting for an anti-waffling review for a while↩