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.""
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
....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.
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.
*Gasps!*
Next you'll tell me that most novels are started and never completed!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
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".
When you came in here, did you see a sign that said "dead blogger storage"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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)
exactly. Blogs are the 21st century equivalent to the CB craze in the 70's. Everybody had to have one but they soon found out any conversations were stupid and boring.
That's a big 10-4 on that, good buddy. I'm leaving the front door open, but we'll catch you on the 9's.
Man I'm old.
#DeleteChrome
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!
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.
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 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
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.
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%.