Cora Nucci of Information Week http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/04/blogging_as_fas.html gives some credence to The New York Time’s recent story that suggests the stress of blogging may have contributed to the heart attacks of three well-known tech bloggers, two of whom died.  While Nucci does say it’s impossible to know for sure whether blogging played a role in the heart attacks, she points out that “some days, blogging feels like breaking rocks in the hot sun.”  Certainly, blogging, like any form of writing in this era of digital media – which can be likened to speed dialing – brings a certain amount of stress.  It seems a stretch to believe that blogging itself would take such a serious toll on a person’s health without factoring in additional underlying health problems.  I could understand how reporters before the 1970s might suffer a heart attack. These writers had to literally pound the pavement, investigate their stories with limited resources, then write their articles and get them perfect the first time – on typewriters. No spell check, no cut and paste, no online thesaurus, no whitepages.com. No Google.  No working from the beach (as one heart attack victim blogger did) or from one’s living room.   Nucci also says, “the burdens of blogging can be felt by anyone who blogs, even amateurs. The urgency to express an original thought and to post it first, is constant.”  The urgency to express an original thought?  Isn’t that what inspires and motivates journalists to get into the world of writing in the first place? Sadly, it sounds like the heart attack victims had critical health issues.