By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Published: June 5, 2009 New York Times
Gist of article is: supply of blogs outstrips demand. Most bloggers give up their blogging project. Quite possible an active blog will have no readership.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
At the fringes, where only partial daily hours of operation with that single line family phone and software that was almost always borrowed, there was a churning mash of small BBS’s coming and going all the time.
Later on when you could buy 8bit computers assembled, find good bbs software and were able join networks such as the mother of them all FidoNet, membership bases started to grow as that model of self publishing and editorial control started to gain ground. Today the model has evolved and incorporated the advances in hardware technology, software and awareness and expresses itself in personal web pages and blogs with forums on every subject as ubiquitous as usenet newsgroups.
My faith is also informed by the fact that people have tried to silence me. I’ve had an account frozen on Neopets, got thrown off of QC-L, expelled from Ladies Retreat, and thrown out of Brainstorms. I will not let any one silence me. When people try to silence you, you realize how precious the right to self expression is and you make sure you continue to write.
http://tacheiru.us/byriatt