You never know when you're going to establish a meme... (Or in this case re-establish it from some perspective other than Christian Bloggers, some of whom were using it two or three years ago, and whom I didn't know about at all until after I did my essay and belatedly Yahoo!d the phrase).

Here's an interesting and entirely non-threatening area for investigation, as noted at another infrequent blog today but also my experience at LISNews:

For some of us, the less we post, the more we get readers or other forms of "goodness." For this other blogger (sorry, but lost the name), Bloglines numbers went up steadily while he/she wasn't posting; when he/she started posting again, the numbers went back down. In my case, my LISNews "karma" points seem to go up when I don't do anything--don't add to my moribund journal, don't comment on other people's posts, don't suggest stories--and not when I do anything.

Maybe Woody Allen's wrong these days: 80% of success is NOT showing up!

The Copyright Office still hasn't published the submitted comments. I want to see my name in print, dammit!

I hope you are back in the best of health soon, Seth, and that you continue to find time to write here.

Absolutely right. I'll still keep polling the RSS feed and I'll keep reading when there's something to read, but commitments in the big room with the ceiling that's sometimes blue and sometimes grey or black, well, those must come first, for all of us.

Walt, I suspect the explanation of that phenomenon is:

Reader comes to the blog from search engine result. Finds the returned page appealing. Adds blog to subscription list. If there are no further posts, nothing happens (so subscriber numbers increase). When the writer starts posting again, the new reader sees that the content is not *all* like the search engine result which appealed to them. So unsubscribes.

The "gain" effect is happening all the time (influx from search engine hits), but the "loss" effect only happens when the blogger posts. Note this implies it should be more prominent for wide-ranging blogs than narrow niche newsletters.

The LISNews "karma" point rises are probably something such as up-moderations by other users.

A* : They're published now

Frank, David : Thank you for the good wishes (I actually had some medical tests last week, which, so far, so good).