"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Raiders of the Lost Blog

by Lee

Quite often I get emails from new bloggers stating, “Hey, I just started a blog, can I get on your blogroll?” As someone who was once a brand new blogger myself I can understand this sentiment. I used to blogroll just about anyone who asked, but I found that I was ending up with a lot of dead links as bloggers lost interest and quit updating their sites.  So, before I’ll add someone to the blogroll now I ask that they have at least two or three months of posts.  Well, the AP is reporting that the “death rate” for blogs is as high as 25%.

Despite the Internet’s ability to deliver information quickly and frequently, the World Wide Web is littered with deadwood—sites abandoned and woefully out of date.

Like many others who enthusiastically start Web sites and Web journals known as blogs, Powell lost interest. The Internet’s novelty wore off.

‘’It was 100 percent the first two or three months of my training for the marathon, then I started to get resentful at having to put these pictures up,’’ said Powell, who lives in Stockton, Calif. ‘’It got increasingly tedious to keep up. I just let that thing go to pot.’’

One study of 3,634 blogs found that two-thirds had not been updated for at least two months and a quarter not since Day One.

‘’Some would say, ‘I’m going to be too busy but I’ll get back to it,’ but never did,’’ said Jeffrey Henning, chief technology officer with Perseus Development Corp., the research company that did the study. ‘’Most just kind of stopped.’’

Writing a blog takes a great deal of dedication, it’s like having a child.  Not only do you have to write it, but I usually end up reading 2-5 articles for each one I blog on, not to mention to try to sift through the 50 or so emails I get every day.  (This post was sent to me through email, courtesy of Dr. Jam Hampson.) I imagine many people put a lot of effort in to it, get disheartened when after two months they’ve only gotten five visitors a day, and throw in the towel.

Other sites die because an event came and went—political campaigns end, the new millennium arrived without computer-generated catastrophe.

This is where I disagree with the AP.  Blogs that were created with a single instance in mind will be preserved forever as a snapshot of opinion on that event.  Like finding the diary of an explorer, an issue blog will be forever preserved in the archives of the internet to guide a future researcher seeking to learn what public opinion was about a particular issue.  And that, my friends, is pretty cool.

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