Wandering through the Weblog Cemetery.

Cameron Marlow started a great thread about the definition of an active weblog. Maciej Ceglowski analyzes a sample from 689,674 weblogs indexed by the NITLE Blog Census. How many blogs are active? For this assessment, Maciej said a site is active if its posts are updated within eight weeks - 56 days.

Findings:

• 65% are active (updated within 8 weeks)
• 60% of all the weblogs, active and dead, were updated within the last three weeks.
• 16% are out of date
• 8% were a blog with just test posts
• 4% were declared abandoned by the author
• 4% were no longer reachable
• 2% were misidentified as blogs by the census machine

While this is useful for calibrating the NITLE results, don't make too much of the percentages. This measurement is a snapshot in time (28 July 2003). A blog's lifecycle: to be born, to operate, and to die. As with people, expect dead blogs to outnumber the living after a while. I look forward to actuarial tables of blog life expectancy.

More interesting: repeat this workup quarterly and compare absolute numbers of active blogs over time.

The two percent misidentification seems pretty good to me. Consider that blogs and diaries come in a zillion layouts.

How would you measure the rate at which test blogs convert to active blogs?