The Death of a Blog

(So Many blogs I read are either dead or idle now.)

When I took down my last blog, I had over 200 visitors a day reading. It almost seemed like a terrible burden but it did motivate you to write. The hard thing about blogging is that if you garner a decent sized readership then you MUST update frequently to keep it. Now, I have maybe a handful of readers and you know what? It is quite nice and I am free now to write about what I want. I can curse and talk about issues with abandon. This leads me to talk about another blogger who recently gave up the ghost and quit.

There is a blog I read mainly out of nostalgia. Not because of the written material. He was a homeless blogger who wrote about politics. Politics bores the shit out of me but I read because I felt a connection with this guy. He stopped writing on May 11 and just disappeared. His name is Michael and he was the original “The Homeless Guy”. He started in 2001 and at the beginning it was just a daily journal of his life. He called it “The Last Day of my Life”.

The most refreshing thing about Michael’s blog was that he didn’t sugar coat being homeless like Kevin Barbieux did. You got to find out exactly what life on the streets in Tampa, Florida was like. It was full of boosting (stealing), drugs, alcohol, and poverty. It was a gritty view of life that brought you back for more as Michael could write about it in an amusing or humorous way. He often wrote that Kevin was full of shit and just an online panhandler. Kevin’s idea for people to make little goody bags for homeless people to help them brought a big laugh from him. He thought the average homeless person would see these good Samaritans as easy marks to be taken advantage of.

Well, today I decided to stop by his blog and to my surprise and sadness he had updated. He has decided that he no longer wants to write a blog and is burned out. I think he hoped he would maybe get a job in a journalistic endeavor but amateur bloggers getting paying gigs is almost unheard of.

The homeless blogging community has lost a great writer and someone I enjoyed reading very much in his pre-politics days. I understand his feelings though and wish him the best. Here’s to the original homeless blogger and the one who wrote honestly about life on the streets. I wish you the best Michael and maybe someday you will rise up out of your homelessness and get that job as a journalist that you’ve always wanted.