On dead and disappearing bloggers

Darryl Chamberlain mourns the passing of Tom Barry, co-author of the Boris Watch blog and @BorisWatch on Twitter, at the age of 41:

I last saw him in March, at some drinks for his birthday. He was in his element — in The Ship in Wandsworth, surrounded by friends, beer and obscure books about long-gone transport schemes. I still can’t believe we’ll never get to do that again.

It is a horribly early age at which to die and a corner of Twitter and the blogosphere which we took for granted has suddenly gone from us.

But then bloggers do disappear like that. In my early days here I used to follow a blog called Not Saussure. The last post on it was in June 2007 and now reads a little ominously:

Back shortly... ...probably on Tuesday or Wednesday; it is, people will be relieved to know, real life rather than Second Life that is demanding my attention at the moment, though personally I’d much rather the problems to which I have presently to attend were in a virtual rather than the real world.

Early comments express concern and impatience, but they soon give way to spam. It is an awful picture of what might happen to your own blog if you dropped dead one day and no one knew your password,

I hope the writer is alive and happy and has found better things to do with his time.

But I hate it when I come across a family blog, full of pictures of their beautiful children in the garden or on the beach, which stopped suddenly two years ago. I always imagine that some awful tragedy has overwhelmed them.