Josh Cohen lists a number of “rules” for corporate blogging that he found. I find one in particular to be important:

3. Once you start, don’t stop

Blogs are like marriage. Once you start one, you are committed. Otherwise, you risk the wrath of those who link to your blogs or tune in regularly. Dr Pepper/Seven Up pulled the plug on its blog after four months.

Many of us write for ourselves, others write for the exposure, others write to try and make a difference. However, we are all writing for the web, and a successful worldwide web is one that is not littered with error 404 pages.

I know, I have been guilty of it too, having started my blog on a clean slate six months ago. It’s something I’ll never do again. We bloggers, we have a responsibility to keep our links and pages alive as much as possible. This means that even though we quit blogging, maybe we could at least keep our sites alive for a respectable amount of time before we pull the plug on hosting the site and paying for the domain. Just a little way of respecting the structure of the web.