Here today, gone tomorrow

Statistics showing the expotential expansion of the Blogosphere in the last few years are all over the place. The latest blog count on Technorati currently shows some 44 million sites being monitored. However, what is frequently overlooked is the huge percentage of these that are no longer active. Four years ago, when the Perseus Development Corp. conducted a detailed analysis of blogging trends, it found approximately four million blogs on eight hosting sites. Of these, a whopping sixty-six percent had been abandoned since their creation, meaning that their owners had not updated them in two months or more.

Even more amazing, over one million of them -- a quarter of all blogs created at the time of the 2002 survey -- were "one day wonders", with a single initial post and no subsequent follow-up posts. Apparently, it's easy to create a blog, but harder to think of something to write about afterwards. Only a tiny fraction (less than 2%) were being updated on a daily basis. Although the number of blogs has increased more than tenfold in the four years since the survey was conducted, it's logical to assume today's percentages are not all that different. For more information, including blogger demographics and other interesting statistics, see "The Blogging Iceberg" on the Perseus website.