Here you are, reading a blog. You're staying up to date with the latest news on fitness, health, food and nutrition. Maybe you also read other blogs to check up on current events, or celebrity gossip, or sports -- but does that mean you're addicted?

You might have blogitis, which, at least according to one public relations speaker, is a real disease.

Richard Weiner, a public relations consultant in Miami Beach, is giving a presentation on the topic at an upcoming conference in Boston. His opinion is that gossip is essential to business. It fuels the stock market, can change an election, or break a new product. In the workplace it's a beneficial tool for bonding amongst employees.

And, because the main source of gossip is blogs, people have become addicted to them.

Granted, Weiner isn't a doctor, and by the sounds of it, his position is that blogitis -- if it exists -- is a positive addition. While I understand Weiner's argument, I'm not sure I agree. I was already skeptical about email addiction and Internet addiction, so I think blog addiction seems equally as unlikely.

Source

Earlier this week I commented on a "discrimination" case in which a fired IBM employee claimed he was an Internet addict. Questions remain about the validity of such an addiction, but nevertheless, Reuters reports today that there is now a 12-step program for those addicted to e-mail.

Real or not, employees' obsession with their electronic messages is feared to be costing businesses millions of dollars in lost productivity. It's estimated that the interruption from receiving and reading a new e-mail disrupts productive work for an average of 4 minutes.

The program, developed by executive coach Martha Egan, includes steps like: "admit that email is managing you. Let go of your need to check e-mail every 10 minutes," and "deal immediately with any e-mail that can be handled in two minutes or less but create a file for mails that will take longer."

I'll admit, some of the symptoms Egan describes sound a little familiar, but does that make me an addict? Is the first step to recovery admitting that I have a problem? What about you? Do you need a 12-step program to break free from your inbox?

Source