Bloggers, Ask Stripe - What's at the Top?

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.