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One blog created every second -- but how fast are they abandoned?

by billdoskoch on Wed 03 Aug 2005 03:18 AM EDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos

A new Technorati State of the Blogosphere report (part one) reports continued explosive growth in said sphere.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March.
It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months. ...

Technorati is like a search engine that keeps track of what is happening in the blogosphere, the name given to the universe of weblogs.
It relies on people tagging - giving keywords to - their blogs or blog posts so that its search engine can find them.
Free blogging services such as those provided by MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, WordPress and Movable Type were also growing quickly, said the report.
Thirteen percent of all blogs that Technorati tracks are updated weekly or more, said the report, and 55% of all new bloggers are still posting three months after they started.
It also pointed to the growth in moblogs, blogs to which people with camera phones automatically send pictures and text.

Now, keep in mind they consider "active" to be one posting every three months.

I've written before that within five years, every journalist will have a blog, but I have more trouble getting excited about statistics that show just over half of all blogs contribute at least one item to the collective knowledge every three months.

Methinks mainstream journalism is still safe.

Update:

So then I see part two, which deals with posting volume.

While it ebbs and flows with events, the trend line for posting volume is going up, up, up.

Here's the summary:

Technorati is tracking about 900,000 blog posts created every day
That's about 10.4 blog posts per second, on average
Median time from posting to inclusion in the Technorati index is under 5 minutes
Significant increases in posting volume are due to increased mainstream use of easy hosted tools as well as simple posting interfaces like post-from-IM and moblogging tools
Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages
During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time (10AM - 3PM Eastern time)
Worldwide news events cause ripples through the blogosphere - not only in search volume, but also in posting volume

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Re: One blog created every second -- but how fast are they abandoned?

by patrickbyck on Wed 03 Aug 2005 02:48 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

In times of quiet, I examine blogrolls just to see how many blogs are truly interesting, and more and more as of late, I find myself discovering the abandoned.

I've spoken to three people today alone that want to put up a blog/photoblog/diary that won't make it past a month.

Ultimately, the numbers will dwindle, but there will be a bloat until then.

Re: Re: One blog created every second -- but how fast are they abandoned?

by billdoskoch on Thu 04 Aug 2005 02:38 AM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Being a journalist, I think back to a book called The Journalist and the Murderer, which contained in it the observation that most people don't lead self-novelizing lives.

It's a bit convoluted, but author Janet Malcom was making the point that Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor accused of killing his entire family, was -- once you got away from the extraordinary nature of his crime -- a pretty dull guy.

And how does this relate to blogging, one might ask?

Blog writing is very much an ego-driven enterprise, methinks -- much like any other type of public performance. And I suspect that once people try it, pour their hearts out through their keyboards -- and then find out no one gives a rat's ass about it -- then the blog dies.

The blogs that continue are the ones that, for whatever reason, have found an audience for the blog performer.

Wow: A nearly deep thought at 2:37 a.m.! :)

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