Slashdot Mirror
Most Blogs Now Abandoned
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""
Nobody blogs anymore. It's all about twitter
OMG I just got my new blog on blogspot, everyone I know is now reading hilarious stories about my cat. Yesterday, he threw up on my carpet and I spent four or five posts describing the *huck huck huck* noise he started making, the vomit on the carpet, removing the vomit, getting the stain out, you know just things people love to read about! Mr. Freckles was sick but he got better! Oh yes he did! Yesyesyesyes!
*one week later*
Oh, blogpost is so last week. It turns out only about one person was reading it but now you can see Mr. Freckles on Flickr! You can actually see the vomit and the piece of yarn covered in bile that Mr. Freckles produced! And we have pictures of Mr. Freckles at the vet getting his temperature taken! People LOVE IT!
*one week later*
Oh, Flickr isn't as great as Mr. Freckles thought. It turns out only about one person was looking at Mr. Freckles but that doesn't matter because I just figured out how to get my own podcast! Now people can hear my awesome squeaky super opinionated voice explain how cuddly wuddly my cat is! Who's more cuddly than Mr. Freckles? Nobody, that's who! Listen to Mr. Freckles complain about his ear infection!
*one week later*
I guess those five podcast downloads were really just me if you count my laptop/desktop/work computer/iPod/iPhone but that doesn't matter, Mr. Freckles is a movie star! We have our own YouTube channel and we get over 100 views a week! Mr. Freckles is friends with Play Him Off Cat too! We just wish they weren't from the same bad egg posting that "nobody wants to watch your fucking cat!" Well, I know the world loves Mr. Freckles almost as much as I do and you're going to hear about him. No matter where you live or what you do, I'm going to leave a bunch of accounts that are nothing but shells like a trail of used condoms behind a frat boy. And if you post painful anti-Mr. Freckles posts about me and Mr. Freckles, I shall only redouble my efforts. I will not stop until I find a way to bring Mr. Freckles' love to you!
My work here is dung.
Who would've thought that??
I've had my own site since last millenium, primarily as a way to journal my family's life for myself and people in my extended family. It's been a great communication tool to keep up with everyone, and a huge time saver when it comes to sending individual e-mails to everyone.
It's also been a great historical record of when things happened. I'm embarrassed to say that I've checked my blog more than once to make sure I remembered my daughter's birthday right.
It was also a great way for everyone to stay in touch on 9/11. Two of my family were flying that day, and it was a central place where everyone could post their flight delays and locations.
The dream is not dead, there never was one.. But what there is is a public, searchable record of things that people who have "abandoned" their blogs have magnanimously left online for all to search and see. As a system administrator, searching what Quenqua or Technorati deem abandoned has saved my ass more than a few times. Seems like a typical perspective on blogging that has been clouded by a few years of some major bloggers gaining commercial success. If you aren't a sell out, you aren't a blogger. No small timer's allowed. Come on, we don't all blog to get rich and famous, and I guess if that isn't in keeping with Technorati's business model (whatever that is) then bloggers are all failures in their eyes. I for one will keep searching and using blogs, however (in)frequently they might be updated.
I tried to keep a blog once, but I honestly had nothing interesting to say. Most the time it was just my idle thoughts, and even _I_ didn't care to read them having just thought them. What few blogs I do read tend to be research or tech blogs. Apparently the millions of monkeys at millions of keyboards do get bored eventually.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Only most? Well at least it's a start...
At the bottom of the
It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place. These are the same people who think I need to be updated every few seconds with a tweet detailing every single piece of inconsequential minutia from their lives.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals.
Some huge deals.
How many of those 50,000 were spammers throwing junk on blogspot or other sites to get pageviews for spamvertising? They'll continue to make tiny amounts of money for the spammer community forever!
..that people aren't as interesting as they think they are. *shocker!*
Scientists and psychologists have long proven that keeping a personal journal or diary to keep track of your accomplishments, failures, goals and dreams is a very beneficial.
So, blogging is still a good activity for people. Even if no one else reads their blogs.
As for the people who thought they could make a career out of it, well, they were just idiots.
As always , given the chance to "BLOG" for any real period of time , users will eventfully forget and abandon anything requiring more reading and typing then the 15 seconds it take to mix in the cream and sugar.. We have a "cooperate strategy" this year to update and maintain blogs, other then management's commitment to the work required ...
lets just say that if it's not in the staffs department reviews..it's not getting done.
*g*
Frankly scarlet ...
Darwin Enforcement Agent
I think whoever thought the name up was a twit. The name sounds like someone barfing (which is what it usually is).
Don't get me started on twit^W tweet.
Technorati, Webby, blogs, twits, all one big circle jerk.
....that is, those autogenerated blogs on free sites that just contain a mishmash of keywords - or a bunch of stolen content. Those lie fallow because there's no real blogger behind them.
I used to blog technical stuff once or twice a week... now I twitter the little stuff and save blog entries for something more involved, like using setrlimit on Mac OS X. Hard to boil that down to 140 characters... unless it's "setrlimit apparently not working, but the server's running Linux, so, meh".
The Army reading list
It seems the ideas behind twitter, facebook, and blogs are "my thoughts are so important that I'm almost obligated to allow everyone else to read them." Or in twitter's case, "my stream of consciousness is so important [or insert "funny," "witty," "cool," or whatever] ..."
In my experience, while listening to people is definitely a Good Thing, I don't need to listen or read your every thought. For the most part, it gets fairly predictable after a few blog posts. And, frankly, for the most part, I don't really care. I don't care what someone's dog ate :)
The idea that my thoughts really SHOULD be read by other people seems to be an egotistical way to go about your life. And, incidentally, if most people have that attitude - which I think most do, it seems to be human nature to overinflate one's importance in one's own view - then reading other people's blogs won't be very consistent...
And of course, I'm posting this on slashdot because this comment is important and everyone should read it.... :P
The people who have nothing to say are all on Facebook now. The remaining blogs are typically either from people who are serious writers, or those who simply need a place to post operational info like software updates.
And the, of course, there's Twitter.
The last post I made on my blog looked like this:
http://vintermann.paranoidkoala.org/archives/000108.html
I am undoubtedly one of these dead bloggers. But somehow don't feel bad about making posts like this once a year, when looking at the site of the guy who's posting every day about what his dog eats!
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
During my time in college I was required to make one in at least 8 classes, I suppose I could have argued and said I already had one but when it came down to it, I didn't care so I just did a new one. Hell those assignment were basically free points but I don't think I ever got full marks on them.
1. Start a blog.
2. Start blogging.
3. ?
There is no four. I quit.
Sig this!
According to a recent survey, 0 editions of the NY Times have been updated in the last 120 days, meaning that 100 percent have essentially been abandoned, left to lie fallow in landfills, recycling plants and at the bottom of bird cages.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Every now and again I create blogs with my name prominently featured to throw the man off when he tries to google me.
some people post less often than 120 days. I started mine to let my family know how I was doing in Iraq and posted once in a while to let them know I was OK. Now I post various updates to my life, book reviews, or anything else I feel like. Surprisingly, some people in my and my wife's family actively read and await the next post. I have a friend who sometimes posts less often than 120 days, but I wouldn't call his abandoned either.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
NY Times that according to a 2012 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million FaceBook Pages had been updated in the past 120 days
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NY Times that according to a 2016 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million Slashdot Users use Tachyons to revise old posts in the past 120 days
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Ridley Scott releases BladeRunner Penultimate Edition, with "prophetically accurate" vision of 2109
...were abandoned due to the blogger dying?
And how many were abandoned due to them dying from performing sexual acts involving long objects?
Blogs don't cut it. Twitter is for imBESils. I write down all my random, meaningless thoughts on Slashdot!!
Hey! Is anybody reading this??
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I only signed up for those blog things to try and improve my SEO, nothing more... For whatever reason Google likes to rank them higher
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
It sucked.
The other one sucked too. Even I didn't read it.
And the other one sucks, but I don't add to it, so I don't bother.
Yours pretty much sucks also. Just sayin'...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Who would've thought that?? ... besides Theodore Sturgeon and everybody who heard of his law.
(Reminds me of the classical music program host at UofMichigan's official radio station, decades ago, declaring the death of rock-n-roll because only something like 10% of all rock songs were new compositions that year - some decades into the rock music era. Was sorely tempted to call him up and demand he also declare the death of classical music, since 0% were new compositions. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I usually blog about technical things that I think might help people out. I don't care if I'm famous, and I leave personal stuff to Facebook where friends and family that might care can read it.
My blog gets about 50-75 hits a day, all from search engines searching for items I write about. Of course they aren't going to come back and read me every day, and that's not why I write it. I do it mainly to give back a little, since I've been helped so often from googling (er, I mean blinging) for info whenever I get into a jam.
And I'm not even going to link to my blog from here just to prove I'm not an attention whore!
Now if I can just remember how to get to my blog...
Who would have thought.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Most Obvious Stories are Obvious, Full Story at 11!
3 abandoned mines? 4?
all this "social" crap will be gone in a few years.
Most people are unable to carry on a good conversation for 15 minutes. Writing and being interesting for days on end is even more difficult and, no, I don't find reading about what you did yesterday to be interesting.
Thank god.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe he's doing it wrong. My site http://www.geekazon.com/ which mostly documents a big home renovation project, consistently brings in about $30/month from Google ads. Pays for my DSL line it does. I started the site mainly to keep distant relatives informed about the remodel. I have only updated it a few times in the past 5 years and have done nothing to promote it, but it's usually the top Google result for "lifting a house".
My site stats are crap, but there is a small audience. It's about the love more than anything though. As well a way to keep those who care in touch. Yes my ads have earned me a whole zero dollars but I sill hold out hope :-) and Amazon integrates well with my blog anyways.
...in bed
Let's face it. Only a handful pursue with tenacity the desire to regularly inform the world of what they're thinking about or what they are doing. A fraction of these actually have something interesting to say.
Blogging will go down the route of 27 MHz CB radios. Nice to have tried it but most information you think interests the world just doesn't.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
...blogging was a fad. The truly first wave blogs have probably been dead for two years now already; and the blog was also probably more needed during the Bush administration, (as a form of indie media) than it is now.
It will come back around, in time. Fads always do.
I can see why he never made more than $20.
Site is an eye-fright.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Honestly, how many people start a blog honestly expecting the blog to become their job?
I started mine as a means of keeping my out-of-state family up to date on what's going on with us. I update it once every couple months.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
For a long time, the information on the web was put there magically by the techocracy that architected it. For non-tech users, getting their information online has been through ever-easier methods of publishing. Web-logging, aka blogging, was just another step in this phase.
The motivation for providing content varies, but psychologists would say that part of it is in the feeling of belonging with peers you identify with. From forum posts, Wikipedia editing, Amazon reviews, posting youtube vids of kittens in sinks, etc - there's a clic for everyone. These are new-found "friends" that people interact with by simply making something appear online.
There's also a compelling push to do what the longstanding "professional" journalism has done for years. So, there's a group that pushes to create look-alike content that fills a niche, but do it online and for free (except for ads). We get "independent" media outlets, political commentary, diy comedy routines, and websites covering local issues. Quality and regularity varies.
All of these things are good - it pushes the body of human knowledge and interaction into a universal format. The transmission (physical wires) and delivery styles might leave something to be desired, but it's in a fairly searchable format as uncontextual text (that context part is still a challenge, all you search engines out there).
I look forward to the slow spread of not just content, but the focus on a universal context system that gets us a more semantic web. Also, we might also get live connections directly to 1 or more senses in real time, someday. Putting these together and you pretty much get an augmented reality stream, completely customizable, so that you won't have to remember so much as be able to process the extra info fast enough. That'll probably hit an upper limit on our brainpower, but we always seem willing to try (driving while using phone and more). After that, jumping over the senses to just filling artificial neurons with the info, accessible by our natural ones, will be the challenge.
Exciting times, this Information Age, still in its infancy.
Yea... because sites with 50,000 visitors/day always have an Alexa rating of 5,987,085. 3 visitors per day is more like it. Congrats on scheming the people that bought ad space though.
But no one has seemed to summarize the obvious: weblogs are like self published books. When the amateurs do it, the audience will be small. When the pros do it, they can be entertaining. Look at Roger Ebert's blog for instance. (No link provided; this is not an advert).
Gotta update my blog.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
:) I'm pretty sure dial up Internet access is staying dead. I miss FidoNet sometimes though.
Most people's blogs suck for the simple reason that they have no content.
A blog is only interesting if you can post info that others would not have been able to find on their own, and that they would want to find. Most blogs fail on both counts, so they only post short commentaries and links--links that often only lead to posts in other people's blogs, instead of straight to the content that is the subject of the discussion.
{-blogs do work well for posting personal information and stories for family and friends to read; that is a realistic use--but then, the target audience is only a few closely-related people-}
Now if Google would just introduce an "ignore blog results" option, the dreck of this part of the internet would finally get the attention it truly deserves.
~
I feel very strongly about this issue but things have been really crazy lately and I don't have time. I will be write about it in my next post, which should be really soon!!!
I think one reason many blogs fail is because the blogger didn't set up a posting schedule beforehand. Many blogs that I like to read promise they will put up a new post every Sunday, or every M-W-F or whatever works for them. I like it because I know when to look for new posts and also because it shows commitment on the blogger's part to the blog.
The Travelling Adventurer
All I have to say is:
.
Table-ized A.I.
Most men lead lines of quiet desperation. They don't blog.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
nothing more than machine-written advertising copy?
Who expects those to get updated anyway?
I deleted any blogs though, I realized I just didn't want anybody knowing anything about my life.
Twitter is selective multicasting to you - from people you wish to hear about. Wanna know what Kevin Spacey is doing? Or Nathan Fillion? Follow them http://twitter.com/KevinSpacey http://twitter.com/NathanFillion
Wanna get breaking news? Follow it http://twitter.com/cnnbrk
Wanna get TV news follow it http://twitter.com/TVbytheNumbers
Wanna get spam? No - then don't follow spammers.
Very simple. Nobody can see you stuff you don't want to know about.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
does this mean the war on blogs was a success?
"I hate your blog. You own a dog, and you feed it. You post about it. I get to read it. Plus: five paragraphs on the socks you bought and your thoughts on whether Nicole Ritchie's hot or not. You got no reason to be typing, yet you persist. Hit each key with your fist till you punch out your top ten list of all the things that ever happened in your life. Number one: met Michael Jackson's second wife. Number two: got Curly on the Which Stooge Are You Poll, as the GIF proves. Click for the link-through! Three: saw puppy pictures on a web page, kittens in a nest egg. The idea gestated: Why not open up your own? So you bought the account and yet I hope you don't put the payments in on it every month like they want, 'cause then you'll disappear off the internet, haunt just the Wayback Machine like a ghost. And I won't be like, "How come you don't post??" I promise I won't." MC Frontalot hates your blog.
First, some blogs simply exist as part of spam and SEO objects. Furthermore, there are many specialized blogs out there that only update rarely because their specialties only require infrequent updates or have to do with topics that have bursts of news and then very little. (See for example http://presidentialdebateblog.blogspot.com/ (disclaimer: one of the people who runs that is my twin).
In any event, humans go through many different things on a temporary basis. Would one have made a big deal in 1938 or so when there would have been more cars disposed of than currently functioning as evidence that cars are going out of style? This really doesn't tell us anything useful by itself.
"I use twitter a little differently from most, but to me, twitter is really just group SMS."
Fine, but I don't get the attraction for SMS either.
You know, I have yet to experience any social networking site that actually hooks me up with new people (as friends or otherwise). They all seem geared to keep me in touch with current friends or get me reacquainted with old friends. They strengthen my network with people I already know but don't put me in touch with new people I'd like to know. Are there sites I'm missing that do that?
I run my blog on dealing with cancer as a young adult the same way. I knew from the start that I didn't want to write about day-to-day events ("Got my 4th dose of chemo", "I feel sick", "Today I'm going for a walk"). I wanted to write about bigger issues after I had time to think about it ("What it feels like to undergo radation", "How many pills does a cancer patient swallow in a week", "Is it possible to maintain a career during treatment").
Looking at my traffic reports I found that my most popular articles were on practical subjects like wound care and symptoms of certain tumors. So now I write more in that vein: first-hand accounts that will be useful to people searching on those topics in the future, not updates intended for daily readers of my blog.
... so who needs a weblog (or "diary" as we used to call them when they were written on pulped dead trees).
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
...a lot of blogs are full of useful information. I'd say 35% of what I google directs me to blogs that are run by people that post actual useful information. Most to do with Linux.
Except there's nothing here suggesting that "blogs" (a vague term, most definitions of which would include Slashdot, incidentally) are dying out. All it's saying is that most individual blogs that were ever created are now no longer in use.
Well, duh. Thank you, Captain Obvious. Long term, this will be true of just about anything.
Most email accounts that have ever been created now lay fallow. Most websites ever created are abandoned. I bet a lot of people signed up to Slashdot as a fad, and then got bored of it.
But it would be ludicrous to suggest that email was a fad that was therefore dying out anyway.
A "blog" is simply a kind of website anyway - why should we hope that websites updated on a regular basis should die out? Be it Slashdot, a journalist's blog on a news organisation's website, someone who uses a blog as a journal, someone who uses it to discuss ideas with hundreds of friends, and so on?
If you don't like it, don't read it. The only thing "obnoxious" is the guy posting on Slashdot wanting things to "die" because he doesn't use them. (And the way that blogs and social networking sites are stereotyped is rather laughable, when you consider that the stereotype of Slashdot isn't exactly that great to the rest of the world...)
It was so bad, even I couldn't stand it.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You have to take this report with a grain of salt, though. A lot of people set up blogs just to see what the fuss was all about, and probably did nothing with them. Similarly, I just read an article that said that the majority of Twitter accounts only have one post. I wouldn't consider a blog or a Twitter account with less than, say, a dozen postings, to be abandoned, since the authors weren't serious about them in the first place.
Over seven million blogs still active is a healthy number. I'd like to hear a report from Technorati that filtered out the blogs that had less than a dozen postings, and I'm willing to bet that the "5% still active" rises to 35 or 40%.
If this was Fark, this would have the OBVIOUS tag.
Most people's lives are boring. Most TV shows, movies and books aren't about normal people doing normal things for a reason. Normal life and normal people are boring. i know what boring is like, i don't need to know about YOUR boring. A mass email to friends and family can do the same thing without all the exhibitionism and voyeurism. All of this stuff feeds into narcissism.
Few people are funny or clever or insightful enough to warrant a blog.
Worse yet was the bastardization of the word blog by journalists. Folks... if it's part of your job description, it's not a blog, it's an article or journal.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Not sure what you mean. Mod points are partially decided by the viewing account. Singularity is not just one thing, from one group. It's a series of things, and yes - what I'm describing is just a part of it. How would I know what it encompasses? How would you?
I guess now he's been slashdotted it might be more than $20 bucks a month.
But more seriously. Can slashdot editors take off the link to the fucking god awful "things my dog ate" link. It's got no content. Packed full of eye bleeding advertisements and MS comic sans.
I'm pretty fucking surprised he had 'no trouble' getting 50,000 visitors a month with that heap of shit.
Maybe slashdot could try and maintain a tiny insy winsy bit of dignity and not link to that infected asshole of a webpage.
... that there *still* are people on the net, who think there's money in putting ads on your site.
Back in 2004, our advertisement department cheered at click-rates of 0.10%, because usually they were at 0.03% max. Including internal test clicks. I think those 0.03% were completely made of accidential clicks, that happened because someone tried to click on the top tabs or menu, with the banner or skyscraper banner suddenly popping in.
Guess what got them the 0.10%?
Exactly.
Full-screen interstitials, some of which even missing a close button.
I was impressed how good our users were at finding the close button, because even I missed it once, or twice.
And nowadays we got things like Firefox at 25%, and AdBlock Plus.
When people approach me, to put ads on my sites, I usually tell them that I get payed per view. Which fends them off quickly. (I tell the rest to GTFO anyway, because I do not want any ads at all on my sites.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.