When the  New York Times informed me that bloggers were dying, I was shocked. 

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Wait a second.  Am I doing this all wrong?  I post when I feel like it.  I post what I feel like.  And that’s that. 

Apparently, there are more blogospheres than I realized, and the other ones can be very bad for your health.  I can imagine people sitting there in their bathrobes typing furiously at their faded keyboard in the middle of the night.  But why would they do that?

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

Millions in advertising revenue?  Well, there’s a motivation, I guess.  Simple Justice has certainly brought me wealth beyond my wildest imagination.  Actually, it hasn’t made me a dime, but after a statement like the one in the Times, I’m reluctant to admit that I am such an utter blogging failure, having failed to capitalize on my blawg at all, not to mention to the tune of millions.

Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.

That puts me somewhere about a mile away from the ladder, since nobody pays me to post at all.  Man, have I blown this gig.

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

In the short time that I’ve been doing Simple Justice, it’s grown by leaps and bounds in terms of readership, comment and visitors.  Because of my ability to crank stuff out fairly quickly, not to mention my lack of paranoid concern that my posts be edited to within an inch of their life, I post a lot.  For a while, my friends in the blawgosphere were busy making fun of me for being a tad prolific.

But this is fun, folks.  When it stops being fun, I stop writing.  Poof, it all goes away the second I decide it does.  The idea of risking my health, even my life, to appease an audience is nuts.  Beyond this blawg, there is a real world.  It’s where I practice law.  It’s where I have a family and hobbies.  It’s where I live. 

I wouldn’t be inclined to work myself to death in any other endeavor, so why would I do so here?  My habit is to sit down, read a bunch of stuff that I have always read anyway, make note of things that interest me and pique my interest, so that I can post about them later.  In the early morning, when I wake up as I always have, I plop myself down in front of a computer and churn out a few posts.  Okay, sometimes more than a few.  Then I get up and go to work.

During the day, I see if there are any comments or emails of consequence, along with the stuff that I receive for real things, like my cases.  Sometimes, if there’s time, I deal with them.  Other times, they just slide into oblivion as real life leaves me no time to pursue them.  Either way, life goes on.  That’s the point.  Life goes on.

From the outside, it’s hard to tell whether a blawg is a large brick edifice of great substance, or a tiny ramshackle cabin in the middle of nowhere.  It can all look the same on the internet.  I’m often amused by the thought of some commenters who probably spend more time trolling the internet in search of post that demand their critical commentary.  It becomes consuming to some.  At Lat’s blog, the commenters fight to post the first comment, even though it often says nothing more than “I’m the first comment. Woo Hoo!” 

Simple Justice, of course, is a major enterprise, with many elves in the back rooms researching, writing, thinking and then thinking some more, about the major issue of the day in the law.  That’s why we are so important in the blawgosphere and why readers flock to us to learn of critical events in the law.  While you may feel sorry for these workaholic elves, slaving away night and day in the cubicles hoping to someday live as good a life as Dilbert, it’s great for me.  I barely break a sweat. 

If only those millions would start rolling in.