Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 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). —The Blogging Iceberg (Perseus)
Predictably, Orlowski is all over this one, especially because the news broke during Harvard’s $500-a-head BloggerCon. Don’t miss the comparison between blogging and a dog licking its own genitals.
KairosNews points to Oliver Wrede’s reaction to the Perseus survey; Wrede notes that the survey was skewed towards the personal blog, and didn’t seem to include users of the power-user weblog tools such as MovableType.
My trawling of BlogDex reveals “Deflating the Blog Bubble,” which sensibly suggests that — gasp — blogs might not be the solution to all the world’s problems. (That article suggests that blogs are mostly of interest to upperclass white men, which is interesting in light of Orlowski’s assertion that most blogs are written by teenage girls.)
Counting all the active blogs is more meaningful than counting up all the dead ones. Here’s a good example of a blog that was destined to be short-lived. The blog at the address “davidsgal.blogspot.com” is a good example of a blog that was never going to go on for very long. In the first of four posts, Alicia (who also goes by the name “tinkerbelle”) worries that the titular “David” will go back to his his ex because “shes pregnant with his second kid.” The second post deals with David’s reluctance to kiss Alicia in public, and the fourth post (titled “Poop”) begins, “Well, he broke up with me.”
If this blog dies, it’s because Alicia is no longer “davidsgal”, but that doesn’t mean that Alicia is no longer a blogger.
I think that the survey is flawed to the point of being almost meaningless. It looks like you’ve noticed and noted many of the problems with it. Good job on linking to some ofthe reaction to this story.
Perseus didn’t survey any MT blogs, Radio Userland blogs, blogs hosted under their own domains, group blogs, dotEDU blogs and many others. The sampling of 3600 out of 4.1 million makes extrapolation questionable. The fact that the 4.1 million does not include any of what is arguably the cream of the crop skews the survey in a negative way.
I’ve expounded on this more in my own post at http://www.blogscanada.ca/blog. (Not trying to spam your comments, by the way. I’m just too lazy to reword and retype everything I’ve said there and I think that a copy&paste job *would* be spam.)
I’ve also noted how some in the mainstream press and Orlowski, in particular, are using this survey to cast blogging in a bad light.
“No less than a million of the 2.7 million weblogs surveyed had been abandoned after a day, and 132,000 would-be webloggers gave up after a year.”
This sounds about right to me! Writing is work and most people don’t have the determination to stick to it. But these stats don’t damn the genre. More than 2.7 million people fire up their word processors and say they’ll write a screenplay every day, too, and then decide to play Solitaire instead. Does that mean screenwriting is a dead art? Of course not.
Isn’t there some sort of blog of dead blogs? I seem to recall bumping into one long ago.