Abnormal Returns (one, two), The Reformed Broker, and Felix Salmon all opined on the health of the Financial Blogosphere today.? It’s dying.? It’s not dying.

As an actuary, I don’t have to be so strident.? Death is a normal thing for fallen men and their creations.? The only question is how rapidly they die.? A good experiment would be to list all of the economics & finance bloggers publishing in 2007 that are still publishing in 2012, at least once a month.

If you are a blogger on economic, financial or investment topics, you have to have something burning within you in order to post regularly.? If you don’t have some reason to speak, you won’t post much.? After all, no one makes much money off of pure blogging.? My blogging buys food for my family for two months of the year, no more.

Think of forks in the road.? Many stop blogging because:

• Life goals change
• There are few rewards, and many annoying commenters
• Regulatory standards stop them
• They don’t gain traction and give up
• They get lots of negative feedback, and give up
• They go professional
• The markets shift — they blogged during the crisis, and don’t know how to blog in normalcy, or vice versa.? I have my share of detractors from both eras.
• They run out of things to say.

I was once part of the RealMoney Columnist Conversation, and unlike most, I would dispense post-long comments, which the editors would occasionally republish as posts, which they never did for anyone else that i know.? If you have something that is valuable to say, people will listen to you.

As for Felix’s take on blogging, I am somewhat sympathetic, but my sense is that things are not the same but are on average the same.? I don’t see a lot of new stars.

All that said, though I like some corporate bloggers, like Felix, for the most part I still like those who are independent and express their own views by nature, because they aren’t getting paid by someone else.