Except for one post about the so-called “Judas gospel,” I have not blogged here since March 6. I have put up a couple of short posts over at Winds of Change during that time.

With every day that passes, it become decreasingly likely that I will resume writing here. I wrote on March 6 that “personal and professional obligations must take priority” over my blogging. That was true and it still is. I did not mention then that I was also suffering from a chronic illness that came upon me in January, from which I have only recently recovered.

As I have contemplated resuming writing here, I have increasingly realized that I have enjoyed the freedom to do other things than write, write, write every day. I have actually had the time to read whole books cover to cover (like this one).

I have also contemplated the future of blogging and have concluded that single-author sites are the wave of the past. Group blogging, with only a few exceptions such as Instapundit (of course), is becoming the norm. I think it almost certainly because the time requirements for a single author to keep a site going are oppressive, if the site is to have a significant daily readership - say, more than 2,000. I was blessed to have attained a respectable daily readership number, but good heavens, it was work to keep it going. Group blogs are able to spread the labor, and that’s why they are becoming more and more common.

Last summer, Winds of Change’s founder, Joe Katzman, invited me to join the author list there. I accepted and since then have posted 20 entries there.

Another reason I don’t think I’ll return to solitary blogging is that there is a far greater number of expert folks writing about my kind of topics than there was when I began in 2002. For military affairs, just read about the Milbloggers Conference in the D.C. area that was held earlier this month, organized by the remarkable (and now major) blogger Andi, an Army officer’s wife. There was a lot of talent at the conference, and they are tracking current events and doing analysis more closely than I can in that particular area.

Finally, Michelle Malkin’s new and hugely successful blog, Hot Air, does seem to me to be the real wave of the future. Its outstanding layout and design and fantastic audiovisual integration make it the cutting edge blog now. Her daily “Vent” feature is short enough not to postpone viewing, can be downloaded in movie form to iPods and has a high production value. Blogging in general will have to follow her lead and sites that don’t will be fighting for ever-smaller readership numbers. That means that blogging has started to move away from its “amateur hour” status and is now at the start line of becoming professionalized. While the financial costs of converting my site into this “new wave” kind of site would not be great (the software and equipment are surprisingly cheap and for podcasting, for example, are actually free), again, I simply don’t have the time or frankly, the inclination.

But the last four years have been a great ride and I am grateful for all those who have been reading. This site will be online for at least a few months. See you from time to time at Winds of Change.

Update: My, my, such over-reactions from commenters. Apparently they take umbrage and think I am advising them to close their blogs. “Logtar” even says I’m lazy. Let’s see - since opening his blog in January 2004 he’s posted 645 times, an average of 23 posts per month. I had 3,653 on my Blogger-built site alone, and moved to Wordpress in April of last year. Since then I’ve added more than 1,000 more. But Logtar calls me lazy.

Then there’s Inn of the Last Home, who thinks I’m advising all solitary bloggers to shut down. So does the appropriately named “This Blog is Full of Crap.” That’s just ridiculous. I’m not advising anyone to shut down. I’m not even shutting down myself, I’m just moving my future content to a team blog where I don’t have to post every day or even every week just to keep it going.

But, as I noted in a comment at “Last Home,” the vast majority of blogs have low readership now, and by that I mean in the dozens. So did mine for a long time. Different people blog for different reasons and 100 or so readers per day may be quite satisfactory to them. It was to me for a long time, too. I didn’t seek higher numbers, they just came. But the fact is that low-readership blogs are not significant in importance to the blogosphere at large, no matter how important they are to their authors or few-dozen readers. Increasingly, team blogs and blogs integrating different media will dominate the ’sphere, By “dominate,” I mean attract the vast majority of readers and have the most influence in larger society. Yes, Logtar, I do know there are blogs that discuss knitting and they are important to their authors and readers, but frankly, get a grip: they are utterly unimportant to everyone else and have no effect whatsoever in larger society. I’m not trying to demean those kinds of blogs at all; let me re-emphasize that they are obviously important to their authors and readers. But the vast majority of readers, as well as the ad money that blogs will increasingly generate, will revolve around fairly few blogs.

That won’t matter to niche bloggers, whether knitters or some other closely-defined group. We might even consider milblogging, political blogging or religion blogging niches, but they happen to be niches of high interest to millions of people. They are also niches of deep significance to our society at large, including people to don’t read blogs at all. Hence, blogs that focus on those topics (and there are other topics, such as sports and entertainment) will by their nature draw higher readership than others.

I do not know for certain that the labor intensity of maintaining a high-readership, solitary-author site will diminish their number. But I think it will - Bill Quick invented the term blogosphere years ago and was one of the early solitary bloggers, very successful, but now his site is a team blog. James Joyner started solo, built a much larger readership than mine, but now his site is a team site. Ditto with Winds of Change, for that matter.

There certainly will be lone-author blogs that will thrive. Instapundit is pretty much on automatic pilot. But as writers who are already well known increasingly start their own sites (i.e., Michael Barone and - I think - Charles Krauthammer), they’ll garner more of the reader pool.

To recap: single-writer blogs are not going away, but the vast majority of such blogs finally get discontinued (this has been reported many times in the blogosphere, based on data from Technorati and other tracking sources). OTOH, team blogs live much longer and tend to grow readership. If you want to write about model-airplane flying, go for it and have fun. Just understand it’s a small reader pool for you. But if you want to blog about topics of national interest, I think you’ll find yourself increasingly increasingly competing with team blogs whose authors are not continually under the posting pressure you are and whose content will overall probably be higher in both quantity and quality. When these blogs start to migrate to the media integration such as Hotair’s they will become even more attractive to readers.

Much is being made today of the “Judas Gospel,” a set of papyrus texts recently acquired by the National Geographic Society and authenticated as ancient, dating from about 140 years after Jesus. The texts were discovered in Egypt in the 1970s.

Judas was one of the Twelve, who were the core group of disciples of Jesus during his ministry. Canonical gospels agree that Judas betrayed Jesus for money paid by the Temple priests. Obviously, the “Judas gospel” wasn’t written by Judas, who committed suicide after Jesus was arrested in Jerusalem.

The Mercury News reports,

Judas Iscariot, long reviled as history’s quintessential betrayer, was actually the best friend of Jesus and turned him over to authorities only because Jesus asked him to, according to the Gospel of Judas, a long-lost document presented Thursday by the National Geographic Society.

The document, considered by some to be the most important archaeological find of the past 60 years, purports to record conversations between Jesus and Judas in the last week of their lives — conversations in which Jesus shared religious secrets not known by the other disciples.

It was ruled heretical by early church leaders because of its disagreement with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Not quite. What happened is that by the middle of the second century Christians increasingly made a distinction was made between the apostolic time and their own. Also, there were so many writings claiming Christian authenticity that documents of genuine apostolic origin were being squeezed out. Through a complex series of episcopal meetings, by the fourth century the Church decided that only Gospels of actual apostolic origin should be considered canonical. That meant that writings well known to the Church, such as the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), Gospel of Peter, First Letter of Clement, Letter of Barnabas, Apocalypse of Peter and Shepherd of Hermas, and now the so-called Judas gospel were excluded. They simply dated far too late to have apostolic authority. In the case of the Judas document (but not only it), they were works of imaginative fiction, novels basically, which could not form the basis of preserving the teachings of the apostles who had known Christ personally.

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