Mine is only two weeks old but I hear the blogosphere is dead

Noah Brier surfaces this interesting fact: 94% of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati have not been updated in the last 120 days. He also points to Nick Carr’s post entitled “Who killed the blogosphere?”:

As blogs have become mainstream, they’ve lost much of their original personality… I was a latecomer to blogging… But even then, the feel of blogging was completely different than it is today. The top blogs were still largely written by individuals. They were quirky and informal. Such blogs still exist (and long may they thrive!), but… they’ve been pushed to the periphery… It’s no surprise, then, that the vast majority of blogs have been abandoned.

I might not be particularly qualified to comment here given that my own blog is only two weeks old. Or maybe it makes me perfectly qualified.

While Carr has a valid point about the mainstreaming of blogs it seems unlikely that the abandonment of so many blogs has very much to do with how the medium has professionalized. There’s something even a bit contradictory to talking about how “the top blogs were still largely written by individuals” in the same breath as “the vast majority of blogs” (that have now been abandoned).

My guess is that many, many now-dormant blogs were only ever personal experiments in the first place - not trying join in to some big bloggy MSM-undermining conversation, nor get famous, nor make money. Many probably were (and are still) started without any particular purpose or topic in mind beyond keeping a personal journal.

I haven’t got any statistics, but I’d imagine something similar happened with the initial rise of the Web. Back in ‘97 or so I built a website - until I realized I had absolutely no reason to have one at the time.

Update: Digging around later I discover Jeffrey Zeldman’s hilarious response to a Wired article quoted liberally in Carr’s post.