'Blogged to death': it's an attention-grabbing headline, and it's not even about reaction to the current series of Lost. But in March, Russell Shaw, a technology contributor to Zdnet and the Huffington Post, died from a heart attack a few months after Marc Orchant, another US tech blogger, died following a massive coronary. Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting stress, sleep disturbance and exhaustion among members of the blogging community, and there is a question being bandied around: did blogging kill these people?

I've run a pop music blog for about six years and to be quite frank I predict that the answer is almost certainly no, although blogging might have prompted them to have had a quiet cry once or twice. Maybe I don't blog hard enough, but if it's midnight and I'm staggering around somewhere in town drunk when an email arrives on my BlackBerry informing me of some new development in Rihanna's world, it will wait until the next day. During the week, I'll box off portions of the day for writing, or replying to emails. I try to ensure that leaving the office coincides with the end of my working day - an idea that probably horrifies the army of US online scribes who are apparently paid as little as $10 for each post, or by the number of hits their pieces generate.

Many tech bloggers are not bloggers in the old-fashioned (circa 1999) sense - responding to the news rather than breaking it - but instead use the blog format to feed news websites. There's always a new mobile phone whose clunkiness requires dissection, a new security flaw in Windows Vista, or a new USB drive shaped to look like a piece of fruit. Keeping on top of it all is an almost impossible task, but people try, and they burn out, knowing that if they sleep, they're scooped.

Tonight Steve Jobs might file a patent for a new Apple toothbrush. Would it kill any bloggers? I predict little more than a few stubbed toes as hundreds of net pundits rush to their laptops.