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According to this survey by Perseus:
"1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). A surprising 132,000 blogs were abandoned after being maintained a year or more (the oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days)."
I wonder how many of those were library-related weblogs. Sure, a few have come and gone, but I would think that the majority have continued, even thrived, over the past few years.
On a similar note, I wrote an article on the "New Breed" of library weblog writers, which will appear in the March/April issue (I think) of Public Libraries Magazine. I am also in the process of getting approval by PLA to reprint the article here. I hope to have that posted this month...
Posted by Steven at October 5, 2003 11:45 PM | TrackBackI think you are entirely correct that most serious-minded blogs have continued to exist and thrive. There are a number reasons that this much-quoted survey is painting a bleaker picture than is actually the case.
I am the operator of a blogging resource site and Yahoo-style directory of several thousand Canadian blogs, www.blogscanada.ca. Abandoned journals are a professional issue for me and I read the Perseus report with interest. I found the survey via a story in The Register. (www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/33214.html)
First, let me say that any report based on extrapolating the results of a survey of 0.09% of the total cannot be taken too seriously. I find it interesting but I'm unsure as to whether it has much real value.
Besides the small sampling, the report has other flaws. By only looking at hosted blogs and ignoring blogs served under their own domain, they essentially skimmed off the cream before making their anaylsis. They also neglected group blogs and blogs served under *.edu domains.
Since much of their data comes from LiveJournal and LJ has a feature which allows users to set up "private" blogs, accessible only to registered friends, it actually encourages non-blogger memberships. LiveJournal is popular among teenagers but not used widely by more serious bloggers. They do offer demographic data and this was, no doubt, helpful to Perseus. Our own directory drew heavily on this same data to find Canadian bloggers, by the way.
The Perseus folks at least follow their highly speculative report with enough disclaimers to let the knowledgeable reader see that it is fairly meaningless. Not so with The Register's story on the Perseus report.
As I've noted when reading other articles from the Register's Orlowski, he seems to have an axe to grind when it comes to blogging. His story on this survey fails to mention any of the caveats included in the source material. Bloggers generally admit their biases but The Register is trying (and failing) to be an unbiased source of tech news.
I'm an avid blogger with two blogs that I update daily. In doing research for reviews of blogging tools, I signed up for several low-cost or free services to simply test the products. After one post, I abandoned those. This makes me part of the vast dead pool, though I am far from it. I suspect that many typical bloggers have signed up to several services before deciding which one they will continue to use.
The survey does bring a pertinent issue to light. Dead blogs do exist and they are, indeed, becoming a nuisance cluttering up the blogosphere. I can see that blog service providers, like Blogger, may gain a certain amount of traffic and possibly some new clients by keeping these dead pages active. My thinking is that the negative aspects outweigh the positives, though.
At BlogsCanada, we attempted to spider our database looking for dead blogs. The fact that blogs do not serve up 404's when dead, however, makes this a near impossibility. Dead blog pages are still live web pages but are being used as advertising for the providers.
As the blogging iceberg grows, so grows the tip. A better sampling method would have shown a much more vibrant picture. To continue the iceberg analogy, as long as the unseen portion does not really pose a danger, why not just explore and enjoy the ever-growing visible tip?
Posted by: Jim Elve on October 6, 2003 12:19 PMOh, this article sounds really interesting. I started blogging as a way to keep myself writing almost every day. I have one weblog dedicated to my side interest currently in stasis because of file path changes on my web host's part that I just don't want to try and figure out right now.
When I started the Young Librarian blog, I knew that I wanted to keep it going because I enjoyed the constant writing aspect of it. I knew that the focus would need to change at some point. I'll get a job eventually (please god!), and then I won't need the therapy the weblog provides in dealing with the crappy job search. When I floated the idea of expanding the blog's mission to something beyond therapy for me, a lot of people jumped on it. I realized two things: a) I had an audience I really wasn't aware of, but was pleased to have, and b) it's a resource that is truly needed.
I always hear how weblogs are supposed be this dynamic development that's finally coming into its own. We have to realize that these wonderful resources will only survive if the weblog contributors dedicate themselves to being open to expanding or decreasing their focus as needed. IOW, remain dynamic.
Posted by: Katie on October 6, 2003 01:46 PMUnusual ideas can make enemies.