I've been blogging on and off since 1999 and I've seen a lot of friends and other good bloggers stop maintaining their sites over the years for various reasons.

I've been blogging on and off since 1999 and I've seen a lot of friends and other good bloggers stop maintaining their sites over the years for various reasons. Some got married and didn't have their single-person adventures to write about anymore; others got discouraged when they looked at their visitor stats; still others just lost interest. But for the most part, many people who have stopped blogging have come to the realization that maintaining a good blog takes time -- lots of it. A good, thoughtful post can take a couple hours to write and edit. And maintaining an overall theme for your blog that's compelling and not just "random stuff I post for the occasional friend who drops by" is even harder. In other words, having a good blog is like creating and managing a product. As many bloggers begin to realize this, and begin to see other options (microblogging, etc.) they move on. But that's not to say that the entire form of media called blogging is dead. It just means it's stabilizing and becoming recognized as just one of the many options out there for publishing content, as opposed to being the "everyone must have" option it once was.