Wednesday, July 22, 2009

guardian technology & the dead tail of blogging

Recently, I've been looking through a pile of Guardian technology sections which I had piled up for a rainy day, and found a comment by technology editor Charles Arthur (Blogging's long tail is dying), where he explains how he tracks blog entries that comment on content of his technology section. So I reckon he must find this -- hi Charles, *wave*.

Anyhow, to Charles's point about blogging, his conclusion is based on two observations: 1) the reported finding that 95 % of blogs out there haven't been updated for 120 days, so are presumed dead. I don't find that terribly surprising, as there are lots of people who try opening a blog, post two entries with their favourite song lyrics, and find it's not for them, leaving the ruin standing for eternity. In MySpace alone one finds thousands of ghost blogs like this.

Observation no. 2) is that the comment tracking device that Charles set up is giving fewer hits than it used to (and being the editor of the section, he hopes it hasn't become less inspiring over the years). So I'll make a point of regularly commenting on the section to buck this trend :)

At least where I'm standing, which is probably somewhere in the middle of the long tail of blogging, I still feel that blogging is alive.

PS: I forgot to mention that I'm now on twitter:

http://twitter.com/michaelgrr

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