Presentation, the decline of the blog (and the end of this one)

As promised, the research paper and presentation that summarize my research are posted here.

An appropriate article, reproduced below, from the newspaper this morning charts the rise and fall of blogs. I started this one just before the peak last year and today I’m adding it to the estimated 200 million that are in the discarded pile.

An estimated 200 million blogs have been started and then abandoned, writes Tony Allen-Mills in The Sunday Times of London. Research by the Gartner Group, a U.S. technology firm, finds that the blogging phenomenon may have peaked last October, when 100,000 new blogs were being created every day. As well as personal diaries these included corporate, professional, celebrity and other specialist blogs. Gartner concludes that the trend will level off this year, with perhaps 100 million people still blogging worldwide. Other analysts predict that number will fall to 30 million. "A lot of people have been in and out of [blogging]," said Gartner's Daryl Plummer. "Everyone thinks they have something to say until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

Source: Social studies - A daily miscellany of information by Michael Kesterton from The Globe and Mail Thursday, April 05, 2007

I started this blog with two goals in mind. First it was a place to organize my research results in small chunks as I worked through the hypotheses I wanted to test. Second, I hoped to start a dialogue with others interested in the area.

The first goal was met and a research paper and presentation are posted above as the organized version of the results published here. The second goal was not met. While hundreds of people visited, the dialogue did not really get going.

So, until I get a sponsor to undertake more research, here it is, blog number 200,000,001.

The picture? Taken 90 years ago almost to the day (April 1917) by my grandfather, a steamship engineer in the RNR, in northern Russia. The caption reads "Arctic Price after striking a mine which killed 4 men on April 14th 1917". More of my granddad's pictures can be found here.