Doubts about the size of the blogsphere

There are obvious signs for a blog to have closed doors: the domain is gone, the site isn't hosting the blog anymore, there might be technical reasons like it being broken and not fixed for a longer time. There are also not so obvious signs, for example that there's no new posting for quite some time. This may be just because the owner is on a longer vacation trip ... away for new material to blog about. People stop blogging for very personal reasons. An old blog may have silently been superseeded by another one, where the writer is publishing now, forgetting about the former. Admitting that this blog is dead is not that easy as announcing a new one. So blogs die silently, and this is hard to find out automatically, e.g. by using a web crawler.

You might know the proud stats by technorati about the number of new blogs that are claimed and the pings they receive per second, showing how the blogsphere is growing faster and faster, doubling in size every 5 months.

But who is counting down? For instance, I quit jojowiki.dyndns.org and relaunched as micha.wikiring.de taking over the old content. I simply have no means to remove the record from technorati or even google. I can delete a blog claim, but it remains in the database of technorati.

What about all those blogs that haven't updated for more than, let's say, one year. This is incredibly long, for me an obvious sign that those blogs are abandoned. Frankly, I'd kick out a blog if there've been no postings for 1/2 a year.

Bottom line: most probably there are no 55 million blogs, active and maintained. As fine as it is that people start blogging, I am more interested to know when they stop and why. Will you still be blogging tomorrow?