I got an unexpected email from a colleague this morning, which said, simply, “It has been a few weeks since any new posts have appeared on your blog. I trust all is well with you.” He and I don’t communicate that often; indeed, it appears that I’ve gotten only five emails from him since the beginning of this decade. Yet he noticed that I’ve been offline for a couple weeks, and thought he should drop me a note to see if I was okay.

As it turns out, I am okay — just very busy. I’ve been working on several different client projects, all of which were originally scheduled in such a way that they didn’t overlap; but the schedules got moved forward and back, and various other distractions and interruptions occurred along the way — the net result of which is that I’ve been faced with four enormous “project deliverables” in the space of a month. Three of the deliverables have now occurred, and the final one looks like it’s in fairly good shape at this point. The clients all seem reasonably happy, and (aided by the use of cell phones, which don’t tell the person you’re calling exactly where you’re calling from) I’ve managed to maintain the illusion that each client is getting my undivided attention, 24 hours a day.

But while this has been going on, a lot of other “normal” activities had to be curtailed, suspended, or temporarily abandoned … including blogging. I’m hoping to get back to a normal schedule in the next week or so, but I’m painfully aware that my most recent blog was February 10th, some 17 days ago. But it never occurred to me that anyone else had noticed at all…

If you look at other people’s blogs, you quickly realize that there’s an enormous range of “blogging frequency” — i.e., some people only blog every couple of weeks, so you really wouldn’t know if they were temporarily preoccupied, as I was, with other priorities. Other people blog pretty regularly, every day or two, so you would notice their absence … but only if you actually paid attention, e.g., by visiting their blog site, or checking their RSS feed with tools like NetNewsWire.

And, of course, there are the maniacs who blog once, twice, or ten times a day; maybe the entire planet wouldn’t notice their absence right away, but their “target audience” of sports fans, political junkies, computer geeks, or Oprah fans would notice that their loudest and/or most favorite blogger had just gone dark.

But I guess the bottom line is that people do notice a change in one’s blogging schedule, even if that schedule consists of only weekly postings. And that’s definitely a change from the old, life-before-the-Internet days. It wasn’t so long ago that you’d find yourself chatting with some friends or colleagues, and someone would say, “Hey, has anyone heard from Joe Shmoe lately? Seems like forever since I last ran into him…”

Whereupon everyone else in the group would scratch their heads, stare at the ceiling for a while, and chime in with comments like, “Yeah, he’s dropped completely out of sight … got no idea where he is these days” … and “Gosh, it’s been years since I last heard from Joe” … and “I heard he got divorced, but that was when our kids were in kindergarten together — and my kid just graduated from high school”.

Of course, there are some Joe Shmoes who want to disappear from their erstwhile circle of friends, and who depend on the fact that nobody will notice their absence for a long, long time. But in today’s connected world, that’s becoming more and more of an oddity. Think of it this way: if you unexpectedly dropped out of sight for a month, with no advance warning, and your best friend didn’t even notice that you were gone, would you really continue to think of that person as a “best friend”?

In the case of best friends, or family members, many of us use email as a “ping” mechanism these days, just as we used the telephone a decade ago (and just as some of us still do, perhaps). But for the friends and colleagues who are one step removed, and who normally wouldn’t “ping” you with a weekly email to see if you’re still there, it’s interesting to see that blog postings are beginning to fill that function.

So … if you didn’t notice that my blog was dark and silent for 17 days, that’s fine. But if you did notice, and casually wondered if I had died or embarked upon a safari to Africa, I can report that I’m fine … and I’m back.