Blog Obscurity

If you received a newspaper or magazine from Newsweek or the Daily Blatt and there was nothing new in it for 3 weeks, then all of a sudden a new article appeared, then nothing again for a month pretty quickly you would cancel your subscription to these publication.

The same is true for blogging. The article below says that 99% of all blogs never get a hit. They are dead in the water. Howcome?

Many people think that simply by creating a blog the world will beat a blogpath to their virtual door. It's only true if there is something interesting and dynamic there as payoff for having beaten said path. I show up to the blogs I look at because I can expect something interesting and vital for me to read each time I do. It's a subscription. No less than a magazine or newspaper.

I have delisted a half dozen rss feeds for lack of blog activity in the last month. If I don't see posts, you won't see me for long. I don't have time or patience to keep checking in on something that isn't there.

Now, in fairness, my little bitty blog is small potatoes. More like green peas. But, I know about how many hits per day I get. I know who they are who read. I can't go by comments just as talk radio can't go by the number of phone calls they get. If you have a talk radio show and want more calls, field the subject Cat Leash Laws. For or against. Your phone will ring. It's just not a good indicator.

What I am trying to convey is this: I appreciate all the people who read my blog. Even those who disagree with me and don't share all my views on life. In fact I appreciate them even more since I admit I read view friendly blogs more than not for myself. The hard and fast rule if you have a blog must be BLOG EVERY DAY. Several Times a day can be too much. Blog personally, passionately, proveifiate (I made that word up, it's just that it started with P, I'm a preacher have to do this, it means to prove out a thing) and positively. Never stop.

IF you MUST stop, announce it. Announce a start date. You'll lose fewer readers then. I have a blog I enjoyed very much from a man I like, he hasn't posted for a week. I'm about to say goodbye.

BLOG EVERY DAY or don't bother blogging. There's a reason why the most popular blogs just voted on were voted the way they were. They blog every day. Never stop. Read on:

Welcome to obscurity: Blogs and the real world

By Patrick T. Reardon | Tribune staff reporter
November 13, 2007

The number of blogs worldwide is growing by leaps and bounds. But, as popular as blogging is today, most blogs don't have anyone reading them, said Derek Gordon, vice president for marketing for the San Francisco-based Technorati, the Internet search engine for searching blogs, in an e-mail exchange.

Q Your site says you're tracking 109.2 million blogs. That's up from the 94 million blogs that you were tracking in August. In other words, the number of blogs you track increased by 16 percent over a two-month period. Is that accurate?

A That is accurate.

Q The figure of 109.2 million blogs means there is one blog for every 151 people (based on the July 2007 estimate of 6.6 billion people). It also means that there is one blog for every 23 people with Internet access (based on the May 2007 estimate by eMarketer that more than 1 billion people use the Web). Do you have any idea how soon there will be one blog for every person on Earth with Internet access?

A I don't. Remember that most blogs are only marginally active (that is, about one blog post a month), and most are used for personal journaling purposes. Also remember that about 25 percent of active bloggers (that is, people who post to their blogs at least once a week) actually maintain more than one blog.

Q Is there some cutoff in the future that will mean we never get to that one-to-one situation?

A It is likely that the number of registered blogs will one day exceed the number of people who have Internet access, but one cannot extrapolate that, therefore, each of those persons actually has and uses a blog. The combination of spam blogs and individuals with multiple blogs means that the total volume of registered blogs will easily, one day, exceed even the total number of people on Earth, even if only some fraction of those people are, in fact, bloggers.

Q What percentage of the 109.2 million blogs are "spam blogs," or splogs, set up purely to impact search-engine results?

A Technorati, Google and others have an aggressive program of identifying and removing spam blogs so the overall percentage of spam blogs tracked versus legitimate blogs remains largely in check. At any given moment, we estimate that 5 to 15 percent of the blogs we're tracking are spam blogs. At this point, we estimate that between 3,000 and 7,000 new splogs are created every day. They are mostly link farms with various nefarious ends designed to both game ranking systems and to get unsuspecting folks to click into sites that have dubious/illegal monetization schemes.

Q Any idea how many of the 109.2 million blogs you track get no hits in the course of a year?

A Just over 99 percent. The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity.