Reading blogs can give us a window into what someone half a world away is thinking about. It’s fascinating in its way. It’s not without its problems, though. One that’s been troubling me lately are the blogs that have been around for years that suddenly just disappear. It’s frustrating because you’re invested in the story the author is telling and when it goes away it’s like you’ve been cheated out of learning how the story ends. For some of them, the troubled ones, you wonder if they finally found peace in their writing or if the end of their blog means something more ominous. Because the can be such a transient place of broken links and bad URLs, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that some pages just up and vanish.

Still, it’s disturbing in its own way, because it represents years of work gone in some cases. I think the thing that bothers me most is the not knowing. Did the author just decide it was time to move on or did something horrendous happen? Maybe the only thing any of us are doing here on the internet is building a monument to our own electronic egos, but now that I’m closing in on 500 posts, I’d like to at least think that I’ve put together something permanent here – a record of what, at any moment in time, mattered to one person. If I decided to stop writing, I mean, geez, I’d at least leave a note or something.