Dead blogs
I thought I would try a little exercise today.
There is a list of the top 100 Irish blogs at Justin Mason’s site. Now this list is old, but unfortunately I don’t know just how old. However I reckon it dates back to some time in 2008. For my little exercise, I thought I would test those sites to see just how many are still active.
The vast majority are indeed still there . Some however came up completely blank or are restricted access. I decided to test the sites I could access and see how recently they had been updated.
How do you define a redundant blog? I decided that if it hadn’t been updated in the last 60 days then it was probably dead. The result is a little disappointing.
Of the 100 blogs, over half [53%] haven’t been updated. If I use a tighter figure of fourteen days, then 60% are gone.
Now the list claims to give the top 100 sites by Technorati Rank so it is not a comprehensive list of all blogs. However one would assume that to gain a listing, the blog would have to be fairly popular, and the author would have to be reasonably dedicated, to the 60% death rate is a little surprising.
Maybe they are right.
Maybe Irish blogging is terminally ill?!
Not too sure about Irish blogging being dead. Perhaps it’s just merely unemployed at the moment? And I’ll give it a good 3 months before I consider a blog being demised (not counting those that have some sort “I’m giving it an indefinite rest” disclaimer somewhere) and even then I’ve seen the occasional miraculous recovery. Not often though.
Thankfully, the Irish blogs that I visit on a regular basis are still there and going strong. In fact, I’m now off to the darker side of of Irish blogging right now to visit a certain acquaintance of mine. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Goes by the name of ‘Grandad’?
It seems to be very quiet though when compared with a couple of years ago. One sample indicator is IrishBlogs which was an excellent blog aggregator. . That seems to have died the death last May.
Of course they may be loads of new blogs on the scene that I’m not aware of, but I have just discovered Irish Blog Log which seems to do a good job (though I haven’t a clue exactly how it works!)
As for that Grandad bloke? Steer well clear. He gives the genre a very bad name.