Scott Greenfield has advice for bloggers who have decided to call it a day:

I ask you one thing. Take it down. Pull it. Remove it, once and for all. Do this for me. More importantly, do this for you.

For my purpose, you’re leaving your litter and cluttering up my blogosphere. Clean up after yourself so the blogosphere doesn’t become a dump, a wasteland of old/bad news.

For your purpose, your dead blog is a tombstone. When someone googles your name, they may find your old, ugly, dead blog, a monument to failure. Is that the image you’re seeking to promote? Trust me, when your last post dealt with a novel bit of news from October, 2008, you’ve brought yourself no glory. It makes you look bad, particularly when your sidebar proclaims that you’re on the cutting edge of legal news and thought, and that your blog reflects how great you are as a lawyer.

I don’t agree entirely. What looks bad is not a dead blog per se, but a blog abandoned without explanation. There are many reasons why you might quit your blog or not post for several months or move your blog or start an alternative. Tell us why in a last post; point us to the new you. That’s good manners, not to say common sense. If the reason you quit is you couldn’t hack blogging, then its best for all, as Scott suggests, to take down your monument to failure. But old posts have value: we all keep them in our archives. Dead blogs have value too if the exit is graceful.