"The Blogging Iceberg," a white paper by Jeffrey Henning (Perseus Development Corp.), provides a much-needed reality-check:
"Conclusions: When you say 'blog' most people think of the most popular weblogs, which are often updated multiple times a day and which by definition have tens of thousands of daily readers. These make up the tip of a very deep iceberg: prominently visible, but not characteristic of the iceberg as a whole... [The] typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life... An iceberg is constantly dissolving into sea water, and the majority of blogs started are dissolving into static, abandoned web pages... 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned. Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days... Only 106,579 of the hosted blogs were updated on average at least once a week. Fewer than 50,000 were updated daily..." [Thanks to Andrew Orlowski for a pointer on The Register about this research]