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So some bloke called Graham emails me about my competition and he says, like, why don’t you do it yourself then? And here’s a list of names: http://bel-epa.com/area51/library/names.txt.
So I says, OK then. I will. And I write myself a little python like this:
<span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">import httplib</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">import re</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">import sys</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("bel-epa.com")</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">conn.request("GET", "/area51/library/names.txt")</span><br></br><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">namelist = conn.getresponse().read().split()</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">conn.close()</span><br></br><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">activenames = {}</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">inactivenames = {}</span><br></br><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">print len(namelist)</span><br></br><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">for name in namelist:</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> try:</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> host = name + ".blogspot.com"</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> p = re.compile('200[0-9]<')</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host)</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> conn.request("GET", "")</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> response = conn.getresponse()</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> body = response.read()</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> mo = p.search(body) </span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> if mo:</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> activenames[name] = mo.group().rstrip('<')</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> print name, mo.group().rstrip('<')</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> else:</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> inactivenames[name] = "null" </span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> print name, "null"</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> except:</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> print "Failure on " + name </span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">conn.close()</span><br></br><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">f = open("blogdeath.csv", "w")</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">f.write("name,year\n")</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">for name, year in activenames.iteritems():</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> f.write(name + "," + year + "\n")</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;">for name, year in inactivenames.iteritems():</span><br></br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Courier;"> f.write(name + ",1900\n")</span><br></br>And then I plot the results and they look like this.
Which means that of the 7489 potential firstname.blogspot.com URLs:
2692 don’t seem to have anything going on ever or have weird styling so I can’t catch the date headers blogger templates usually use. A quick scan suggests that most are stillborn. See http://ned.blogspot.com/ or http://karim.blogspot.com/ for a couple of examples.
361 were born and died in 2000.
2001 and 2002 were the peak years for firstname blogs, with over 900 dying off each year. Not surprising that this is an early peak: the firstname places would be picked up quickly. Perhaps more surprising is that these blogs have been sitting there for 7 or 8 years, unattended, and blogger hasn’t done anything with them.
The number of dying blogs falls off - meaning that the number of active ones does as well probably. Until now, only 96 blogs have been updated in the first three weeks of 2009.
96 out of 7489. That’s about one in 75 that are active. Pretty small numbers.
How does this silly survey compare with a bigger picture? The Technorati annual review of blogging for 2008 says that about 7.5 million blogs were updated in the 120 days before their report of 133 million that they have ever indexed: about one in 20 or so. Given the longer timeframe, not too bad a match. So 19 out of 20 blogs that have ever been started are now moribund.
And here, for those of you who are interested, the 96 firstname blogs still going strong are listed at the end of this post.
My technorati ranking is about 33 at the moment but I have been as high as 90. That puts me, they say, in the top 1% of blogs. I get about 50 readers a day, many of whom are googlers who probably land here and don’t find what they are looking for. And, on generous average, about one comment per post, so 99 out of a hundred bloggers get few readers and no comments. If these people are a typical sample, maybe one of them gets a comment per post. Maybe you should choose one and say hello.
elvina
adger
minta
cindi
worden
doretta
grover
carmen
charlton
hildagarde
melesa
lillian
miranda
delcina
barbette
urbanus
tina
jess
roland
bonny
madalyn
vivi
corabella
nikoletta
faunie
cherey
henka
terrill
olive
valli
kamila
cherice
lorette
daune
orville
sella
johnathon
aleecia
madelina
dottie
dario
roselyn
merrie
amalea
ephraim
trey
werner
antonino
levon
lavina
saxe
douglas
meira
danila
winston
lavinie
teresita
clovis
chas
letti
anders
edythe
aileen
luanna
huntlee
bancroft
sidonnie
fancie
marcelline
joella
pauline
engracia
oran
kirk
rhonda
leonardo
claudia
evette
kris
bird
zia
wilmette
merrel
fitz
cain
lindy
hope
dwain
mareah
sara
berkley
pinchas
josselyn
robinett
oprah
heidi