Blog and/or Die

It seems blogging has joined parajumping, rattlesnake wrestling, and being personal assistant to Naomi Campbell as the world’s deadliest professions.

Last week The New York Times revealed just how dangerous writing Weblogs can be. Two prolific tech bloggers, Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant, recently dropped dead of heart attacks in mid-rant. A third, Om Malik, suffered a nonfatal attack at just 41 years of age. Then there are the lesser maladies:

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.

Now the truth can finally be told about the Living Hell that is Infoworld’s blog factory.

Over the last year, The Company (as it’s known) has instituted policies to ensure its bloggers keep up a steady stream of posts. For example, we’re no longer allowed to file from home. Instead, we’re all locked inside The Blogging Pen, a steel mesh cage lined with tiny desks and glowing Citrix terminals. Mine is between Lewis and Schwartz. It’s too dark down there to see much, but from the moans I’m guessing Yager sits directly behind me.

It’s all blogging all the time down in the Pen. We’re not allowed to leave until we’ve made our daily quota. Posts that don’t make it onto Infoworld’s site are sold on the blogging black market to Web sites in Malaysia.

Twice a day our Handlers (we don’t know their real names) feed us by spraying a mash of beer, Red Bull, and corn nuts through the holes in the cage. The only time the Handlers enter the Pen is when somebody drops from exhaustion and they have to haul the bodies away. Sometimes, they never return. (And frankly, just between us, Foster isn’t looking too healthy these days.)

Another requirement: At least once every two weeks I have to say something nasty about Microsoft or they turn up the juice on the electrodes. Fortunately, it’s one of the few things I enjoy about this gig. (The nastiness, not the electrodes.)

So: Bill Gates makes an offhand comment about Windows 7 coming out “some time in the next year or so,” and everybody’s treating it like the Book of Revelations. (“And furniture shall rain from the sky, and Cupertino shall be torn asunder….”). It’s just more evidence of how much everybody really wants Vista to retire along with Gates, preferably sooner.

What I want to know is, when did Sir Bill become famous for telling the truth?

Well, back to work. Or as we say down in the Pen: ABB – Always Be Blogging.

Got hot tips or warm corn mash? Spew them below or email them directly to the Pen: cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. Top tipsters qualify for cool stuff of a swaggish nature.