The Stress of Blogging

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

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.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

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.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Full NY Times Article

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U2 and MMQB

Every Monday morning I always make room in my schedule to read my favorite column, Monday Morning Quarterback by Sports Illustrated’s Peter King.  Many of you non-football people may be wondering why there is a weekly football column when the NFL isn’t in season.  Truth is, there’s a lot of NFL off-season news regarding the draft, free agency, and other interesting behind the scenes tidbits.

King always has a section called “10 Things I Think I Think” where he just scattershoots about the NFL, and he saves one of those 10 thoughts for his non-football thoughts of the week.  Of course each thought starts off with “I think . . . .”  This week one of his non-football thoughts was about the U2 3D movie.  Talk about hitting the Geeding Monday morning jackpot.  It was interesting to find out there was a football connection regarding the filming of that movie:

Had a moving movie experience the other day at an IMAX theater in New York. I saw “U2 3D,” the three-dimensional film of a U2 concert in Buenos Aires in 2006. If you like U2, and you’re within an hour of a 3-D theater somewhere in the world and the movie is still playing, you simply have to go. For $16 (or whatever it costs where you see it), it’s the closest thing — damn close, really — to actually being in the middle of a pulsating crowd with Bono wailing out, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” with your leg bouncing up and down. Incredible. Bono’s in your lap. The bouncing crowd, jumping up and down, is all around you.

I noted that one of the executive producers was David Modell, Art’s son, a former Ravens exec, and so I reached out to him to ask about it. Seems that the way his company — 3ality Digital — got the band interested in making a 3-D movie was to show them a 10-minute example of how far the technology has come. And the 10-minute clip was a 3-D highlight show from the Carolina-New England Super Bowl in Houston, where the Modell group shot the game in 3-D.

When Bono saw that, he was convinced to give the production a try, and so the company went to South America and filmed seven concerts to get the footage needed for the 90-minute show. Modell said he took his dad and mom — Art and Pat Modell — to Ireland for the Dublin premiere, and the former Ravens boss, who is not a big rock and roll fan, loved it.

David thinks the technology is there to do live NFL games in 3-D and broadcast them in theaters. I asked him if he thought we’d see it sometime in the next 10 years. “It can be done a lot earlier than that,” he said. “Can you imagine the experience?” I can. Imagine a Giants’ playoff party in the lobby of the Manhattan IMAX theater, then moving upstairs to watch the game. Would that be worth $25 per person? Or $50? Even if the game were on live TV, I’d say it just might be.

MMQB page 4 of 4

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