Blogosphere stalled?

Valleywag reports this morning that by putting together Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere reports with some comments to Business Week, they reckon the blogosphere has stalled at 15 million active blogs. Why?

Well, we already know that more people abandon a blog than continue it. According to Forrester (sub req'd), in the UK in June 2006 5% of people online have created a blog and maintained it; 6% had created a blog and abandoned it. To imagine the blogosphere continuing to grow indefinitely we would have to believe either a change in that abandonment/maintenance ratio or a limitless input of fresh bloggers at the top of the pipe. The former is plausible; the latter clearly not, and the stalling of the blogosphere in this context becomes an almost inevitable question of "when?" rather than "why?".

Perhaps the question then becomes why more people abandon their blogs than keep them. At that point, we are into the realm of speculation and anecdote. I have seen blogs abandoned on grounds that the writer has said everything they came to the medium to say. I've seen them abandoned as the first flush of optimism that the writer was sitting on the next Buzzmachine evaporated. I've seen them abandoned for personal reasons (kids, marriage) as well as professional (new, less blog-friendly, job). And most often I've seen them abandoned without any explanation.

Why, after all, do we do it? If we really had a good answer to that we'd be in a better position to understand why so many of us stop.

Comments

[Friendly Ghost]

Have you ever tried to delete a blog address? You're told in no uncertain terms that you'll NEVER be able to use it again, nor will anyone else, EVER.

Why is this? You can leave a web domain dormant and it's just bought by someone else. But for some reason blogs are different. If you delete your blog, no one else will ever be able to use that space again. Yet surely it's exactly the same situation.

What reason can there be but to artifically inflate the blogosphere? Perhaps the blogosphere really is made of holes? Or maybe this is the dark matter causing it to expand even when there's apparently nothing in it.

[David Black]

Also interesting that, on Dave Sifry's figures, the number of blog posts per day has been relatively flat for the last year once occasional news spikes are filtered out. I find it hard to believe we've hit a ceiling in participation: part of the explanation might be a fragmentation in the range of outlets for users, beyond pure blogs, from twitter updates to facebook messages.