where are they now?

While I've never considered myself a "Koreablogger" in the strictest sense, I've been part of many K-blogger lists compiled by others. I was looking at an old post the other day, and it listed a bunch of K-blogs that had been current years ago. So I began to wonder: Where are they now? Here's a reprint of that list, with one or more additions to round it out. If a blog name has an "X" by it, then it's no longer active and/or no longer in existence.

The Marmot's Hole ❌
Incestuous Amplification ❌
Cathartidae ❌
Scribblings of the Metropolitician ❌
Ruminations in Korea ❌
North Korea Zone ❌
One Free Korea
GI Korea (ROK Drop)
KimcheeGI (moved to Twitter) ❌
Oranckay (moved to Twitter) ❌
Lost Nomad ❌
Flying Yangban ❌
The Infidel (suicide) ❌

The Asia Pages ❌
Frog in a Well (exists, but barely, with 1-2 entries a year)
Gusts of Popular Feeling
Gusts of Popular Feeling
Korea Life Blog/China Life Blog (Shawn killed himself) ❌
Gdimension ❌
Daejeon Daily Photo ❌
Zen Kimchi Korean Food Journal (currently glitching on my computer)
Space Nakji ❌
Big Hominid's Hairy Chasms
EFL Geek ❌
Yangpa ❌
Brian in Jeollanamdo ❌

There were, of course, way more blogs than this, and some Koreablogs still exist that aren't listed above. But if we think of the above as a random sample dating from about 2003 (when blogging became popular thanks to the Iraq War; I started my own blog on July 4, 2003) to now, we can consider the above a kind of random sample indicating a blog attrition rate from 2003 to 2025. There were 25 blogs at the outset; now, of those 25, only 5 remain. That's an 80% drop. I guess, over the decades, blogging has been a brutal business. It's too bad: many of the blogs that disappeared were well written, informative, provocative, and funny.

People move on from blogging for various reasons. Sometimes, life just gets in the way: people acquire families and develop more important concerns than just banging away at a keyboard every day. Other people, perhaps sensing the winds of change, abandon blogging for YouTube or TikTok or Twitter/X or full-on website creation. I'm not judging. But some of us barnacles have never moved on. For all I know, blogging is a dying medium as subscriber platforms like Substack have become more popular (I'm there, too). But for some of us, dogged and determined, blogging turned out to be such a perfect medium for our skill set and personality traits that we simply kept at it, even after all these years.

I miss quite a few of the bloggers who disappeared.