Decline of Web 2.0

In a prior post, I wrote about a whimsical 1870s era cartographic depiction of America as a Young Hog. The source publication from which I first learned of it, University of Michigan's Map Library blog, has since been discontinued. I shouldn't be surprised, even though it makes me feel sad.

Web 2.0 is user-contributed content

Blogs, Huffington Post and Forbes per-pageview paid contributors, BuzzFeed, Second Life, YouTube, image sharing services, question-and-answer sites, and comment sections (for online newspapers as well as blogs) are examples of user-created online content. It is difficult to believe that Technorati tracked millions of active blogs at one point in time. User-contributed content sites seem to have been in decline for years.

Technorati was considered an authoritative source for blog activity. It was before my time, but sounded great, even including a blog search engine that was superior to Google's blog search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?!

That's what Technorati claimed in 2005: Blog growth was frequently doubling. The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general, see "A new blog created every second"! Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was still a lot of Internet hype then.

In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. New blog count was doubling every six months! That's analogous to the real Moore's Law, applicable to technology, not blogs. 

Moore's Law isn't a law of physical science, but rather, a rule of thumb based on the observation that semiconductor processor speeds double every six months. (Moore's Law hasn't held up so well due to the physical limitations: there are only so many nanometers of room on processor chips.)  There's more to read about Moore's Law here including a link to Gordon Moore's original article about it. 

Technorati landing page

With such amazing growth, it wouldn't be long before blogs outnumbered Earth's adult population! 

I found a good summary of the hype timeline from this Fail-0-Pages post, Abandoned Blogs and Life Spans:

In May 2004, Technorati claimed to track 2.4 million blogs, increasing to 11.7 million blogs in June 2005. The Technorati figure was assailed as simply a count of blogs registered: it did not identify blogs in regular use and did not differentiate between genuine blogs and splogs (spam blogs).

U.S. vs Korea race to close blog gap

This is especially amusing, from the same Fail-0-Pages post.

In January 2005,the blogosphere was abuzz with claims that 25% of all South Koreans have a blog, some US pundits lamenting a ‘blog gap’. That supposedly included 90% of those in their 20s and 79% of those under 40. In fact, the figures were for basic homepages – often little more than an email address – with the nation’s service providers, rather than blogs.

Fail-0-Pages seems mostly dormant too. 

Much woo

All seemed to be going well when ZDNet reported on Technorati's expansion using news aggregator tech to add social publishing features in 2007:

This is the first major acquisition for San Francisco-based Technorati, which says it tracks more than 72 million blogs... "We are adding flexible publishing capabilities, so that everyone can find conversations, track up-and-coming ideas and stories, and customize the 'Live Web' in any way they like..."

72 million doesn't seem plausible. 

By December 2008, Technorati reported that only 7.4 million (5%) of tracked blogs had been updated even once in the prior 120 days. According to a September 2009 Slashdot post, Most Blogs Now Abandoned:

Technorati 
unhappy little face

Technorati said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but 50,000 to 100,000 blogs generate most of the page views.

 

Three very hyped Web 2.0 terms were social, democratizing, and world-class. The latter appeared a bit later, often in the context of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Early MOOCs included Stanford University professor Andrew Ng's 2010 machine learning class and Sebastian Thrun's Coursera endeavor.

Technorati also produced an annual "State of the Blogosphere" report that received a lot of attention from Web 2.0 luminaries such as Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis (he live tweeted his prostate cancer surgery), Jay Rosen (NYU journalism school professor who was a journalist for all of nine months, about 30 years ago), Chris Messina (inventor of the hashtag as seen on Twitter), Michael Arrington the TechCrunch guy, and of course, tech evangelist Robert Scoble aka The Scobleizer.

The Scobleizer

This reminds me of Robert Scoble's most memorable user-created content. He chose to demonstrate how well Google Glass computer eyewear worked while taking a shower, then posted a selfie of it on Google+ for everyone to see. A line drawing of the image was depicted in another product's patent filing. Instead of trying to explain the patent part, I refer you to coverage available from GeekWire.

funny i can reach with brave browser: pic.twitter.com/MuWE7MTa9H

— Buck Smith (@NelsonDaleSmith) February 23, 2024

For those of us who do not use Twitter um X, here's a screenshot of what my friend Dale found.

Scobleizer revealed as a nude hairy redhead
taking a shower while wearing Google Glass

State of Blogosphere not so good

Technorati was acquired by a programmatic advertising company in 2013. Without any prior notice, they deleted their entire blog directory.

How do blogging platforms such as Moveable Type, TypePad, tumblr, Medium, and Automattic survive with presumably lower revenues?  TypePad is not surviving; it will be permanently shut down on 30 September 2025.

Automattic is the owner of WordPress, Akismet, and tumblr. There is still work to be found in developing plugins for WordPress dot org sites. Many businesses use Wordpress as their company blogging platform. Some high-traffic publications use WordPress VIP as a content management system. The New York Post online version is one example.

Substack is not advertiser-supported and seems to be doing well. It has allowed some people to find their audience as well as providing independence to already well-known columnists from legacy media publications. 

Video and podcasting can be both ad-supported and subscriber-fee based. Youtube, rumble, Odyssee, Daily Motion, and Vimeo have survived. 

Several online comment platforms remain, as publisher-paid services. Disqus is most common on blogs and smaller websites such as Mediatite and Christian News. Both Yahoo! News and The Wall Street Journal use spot.im for reader comments. Jeff Atwood aka The Coding Horror developed a combination comment platform-narrative project tracking service; Boing-boing and some open source software projects use it. I haven't seen LiveFyre or Interfora for a long time. 

StackOverflow and reddit are user-contributed content sites, but both are troubled, to put it mildly.

Who clicks on online ads?

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest:

People who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged... an advertising executive in Atlanta had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate. 

“I did Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month,” he said. That led to some small advertising deals, including one with PetSmart. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Do any website owners earn a living income or even hefty supplement from banner advertising?  Some YouTube channels do. About 85% of Google's revenue comes from AdWords according to Alphabet annual reports, so I guess the business model still works.

Addendum One

Technorati continued to evolve. It seems to have been repurposed, replete with original logo, as a news aggregator. There isn't much advertising, and there aren't many text articles. There ARE a preponderance of grim news videos. This was the first that I saw.

Technorati transformed - December 2023

Sources are Newser, Canadian state media CBC, and Qatari-sponsored Al Jazeera.

If I were more cynical, I would assume that Technorati was a public relations organ of the Office of the President of Ukraine, given the content in the images above and below.

Lackadaisical website interest algorithms are more likely than the SBU or GRU (Ukrainian intelligence agencies).

Addendum Two

The Fail-0-blog has a good post about schadenfreude as well as linking to the amusing Anger Central and its more modern follow-on Musings of the Angry Webmaster.