"Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest"

From the New York Times, 6/5:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 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.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

Not me. When I started in April 2002, I figured my immediate family would read occasionally and maybe--maybe--one or two other people.

That was 8410 posts and 7126 non-spam comments ago.

Comments

[kyle8]

My blog has indeed fallen on disrepair but I still occasionally add to it. My problem was that not even my friends or family ever read it. Of course I am an uninteresting mediocrity but maybe someday I will do something infamous and then everyone will try to read what's on my blog.

[Phil]

I knew I wasn't the only one who had let his blogging slip in recent months. I'm still posting, but not every day.

I started my blog because blogging looked interesting, it looked to be a low-cost way to write a little bit about a lot of stuff, and because I have a bit of a wanderlust that the standard research route isn't built for.

[Jim O]

7129

[JorgXMcKie]

I'm too lazy to even start a blog. Thanks for all the great posts, Craig.

[david foster]

OTOH, those blogs that *do* gain a following will, along with other forms of on-line media, contribute to the destruction of the New York Times and its capital-and-energy-intensive peers.

[GC]

bravo kind sir