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?

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The tagline of the site is actually ``24 ways to impress your friends''. But in fact they publish articles on web design and techniques one on every day till Christmas. What a great idea! And every day it is the turn of someone else well known in the blog sphere. Alright, there are other people too that are not in the blogging business that would have to say a lot about that stuff, i.e. comming from the online content management world. But since bloggers are much more connected to the web technically and attitude-wise, they are likely to come up with something like that. Plus, this is not focused on a specific product but covers a variety of (hype) issues like ajax, scriptaculous (animated html widgets), dom scripting, css, form accessibility etc. Let's see what comes up the next days ... and who's penning it.

Among other things Wikis and blogs and other dynamic text sources is focused on the type of text produced in these kind of online media. But is text produced so differently from text found in your personal diary or online news ticker? Yes, somehow but that should not be surprising and linguists already suffer from bad text. Just recall the never ending rants on the penn treebank, a collection of Wall Street Journal articles. This is really bad bad text from a linguists perspective with lots of dirt in the data. Note, however, that the WSJ is not some blog. Over a decade or so parsers for English have been evaluated against that beast of data corpus, mostly stochastic methods. Rule-based systems as ours have a hard time to cover all these irregularities. Irregular speech and language is quite normal though: speech recognition in noisy environments but also ungrammatical language, child language. Every aspect of language can deviate from your grammar knowledge for one or the other reason. So systems must cope with so called every day data the same way they do with regular input as good as possible in a robust way. That's why I like our stuff so much: it does not implement robustness on top but it is robust out of the box because parsing is reduced to a constraint optimization problem (read the parers for more info). So far on the new challenges.

Again, wikis are only perceived by its most prominent installation, Wikipedia: "In contrast to blogs, wikis have high ambitions as regards factual correctness, persistence, editorial quality, and trustworthiness." (from the call for participation).