TimesDaily.com has an interesting article that says cyberspace is becoming littered with dead blogs.
Dead blogs litter the Internet like squashed bugs on a windscreen during a warm Southern evening. Since their christening in 1999, millions of people like Haddock have dabbled with blogs only to abandon them after a few months.
"I think a lot of people started blogs because they got excited; the hype was there, but they really didn't have a purpose," said futurist Jim Carroll, whose clients include the Walt Disney Corp., Nestle and the BBC. "There's only so much you can read about somebody else's life before you get bored with it," he said.
The blog rush has slowed down from 175,000 new blogs posted per day in July 2006 to 120,000 new blogs per day as of March, according to Technorati, a blog tracking company.
Blogs with staying power, Endgaget's techno-blog and Boing Boing's curios-blog, stick around because they have a direct purpose, Carroll says. That, plus paid staff and advertising dollars.
120,000 new blogs per day is still impressive but there is no denying that there are lots of dead blogs out there and there is no denying the number of new blogs per day is starting to slow. However, there are always going to be new bloggers just like there have always been new writers.
What's also being overlooked is that other forms of social media are continuing to grow rapidly. Social network profiles and microblogging tools are replacing personal blogs for some. Everything always comes back to the definition of what a blog is. It seems like profiles and microblogs are being excluded from the definition of a blog but it isn't crystal clear.
What's clear is that professional blogging has emerged as a new medium that is rapidly being adapted by the mainstream media. Online media companies are using blogs as a way to provide information and grow traffic online. Newspapers still seem to be launching new blogs daily. At the same time popular online blogs have been expanding into networks and hiring more bloggers so they are even more competitive with established media outlets. The number of professional blogs will probably continue to grow even as the overall blog growth rate slows. Media companies and bloggers recognize that the format is one that works very well online. It also helps that readers appreciate the layout and structure of blogs.
Citing a Gartner study the TimesDaily.com article says that eventually "200 million people call themselves ex-bloggers." That's a ton of dead blogs but it won't matter to most blog readers. Many readers may never even notice the dead blogs because sites like Digg will guide them to new sources. Search engines like Technorati will show them the new content from active blogs first. Readers will just move on to the blogs that are continuing to publish new content and new information. People will continue to want to find out what's new and that's just what bloggers will continue to provide.
