One Blog Year Equates to 7 Cat Years

I spent some time this past weekend sharing a meal with a friend of mine who has been blogging for while.  I asked her how I should go about attracting followers to my new blog. She suggested I start by following other blogs.  Find people whose blog I like, follow them, and research who they follow.  Then start commenting on their blogs.  Eventually, people will find you, if the wind is in your favor.  Sounds easy enough.

Except that I'm a blog snob.

I'm not interested in fashion blogs.

Sames goes for gossip or celebrity watcher blogs.

Salty language and crass humor can make me laugh, but it gets old fast with me.

The only cute pet or kid stories I can stomach for very long are my own.

Technology and political news are too dry, even for me.

Too many pictures, and my mind starts to wander.

Looking back on my "ideal blog" requirements, I'm a little embarrassed by how narrow I sound.  Am I really so critical?  Umm, on a bad day, probably.  The rest of the time, probably not.  Which led me to revise my "ideal blog" requirements.  Scratch the entire list above and replace it with this:

I like well-written, insightful, and clever blogs on a variety of topics ranging from current events to personal development.

With my newfound knowledge of the company I'd like to keep, I set out to find my fellow like-minded bloggers.  Not being particularly high-tech, I relied on my good old-fashioned, organic search skills to find the five blogs I am now following.  I hope as I get better at this, it'll get easier.  I also hope it gets easier before I, like the bazillions of other bloggers out there, lose my mojo and give up on blogging.

Which is really where I'm headed with this post.  There are a lot of dead blogs out there, floating around like little grammatical corpses, littered along the internet highway.  It's a little discouraging, for sure, and also a little unnerving.  So I decided to do some research.  Just what is the life expectancy of the average blog?

"According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled."

Here's the 2009 NY Times article that little stat came from:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html

So the prognosis is not good for this blog, statistically speaking.  Add to it my tendency to eat, breathe, and sleep my latest obsession until sudden, spontaneous burnout, and I'd say my blogging days are numbered.  So I need to act fast, if I want to maximize my learnings from this pet project of mine.  Forget the self-improvement goal, forget the helping mankind goal, I'm on a limited time frame.  Let's aim lower and just focus on understanding the inner workings of the world of online social media before my time is up.