In light of the recent tragic chatroom/webcam suicide, I wondered what an article “Ghosts of blogging haunt net cemetery” might have to say about the role of blogs after a blogger’s life. Alas, this has to be one of the worst, ignorant, mainstream-media puff pieces in a long time:

In the latest entry on her personal weblog, Lindsay Lohan, the hard-partying Hollywood actress, was in characteristically bubbly form. “Hey guys, I’m soooo sooo sorry I haven’t written in a while!!” she wrote. She was heading off to New York for two days of photo-shoots, then to Toronto in Canada for a week of filming, then back to Los Angeles again. The entry ended: “I just wanted to check in, I’ll try and write more … xx LL.” It has been a long wait for any Lohan fans who may be hoping for an update. That entry was posted on October 15, 2003.

Lohan’s blog has since taken its place in the internet’s fastest-growing graveyard – of an estimated 200 million blogs that have been started, then abandoned.

The extraordinary failure rate of online diaries and claims that interest in blogging will soon begin a precipitous slide are sparking an intriguing debate about the future of self-expression on the internet and whether blogs, once seen as revolutionary, are destined to become a footnote in the history of computing.

To the embarrassment of millions of internet users – from Hollywood celebrities such as Lohan, Melanie Griffith and Barbra Streisand to countless ordinary parents, workers and would-be poets – the evidence of failed diary-keeping cannot be easily erased from search engines that continue to provide links to blogs that have lain dormant for years.

This article clearly commits many of the most juvenile mistakes about writing regarding blogs — no, not all blogs are online diaries; no, celebrities who blog are no more typical of bloggers than they are of people — but even a journalist who has never read a blog should feel a little silly making the leap to describing the ‘extraordinary failure rate’ of blogs. Or are blogs, unlike regular diaries, or pretty much any other form of narrative or writing – the only form which is supposed to be endless? Blogs have been around for a long time and, like most other things, many blogs have had their natural lifespan, dictated by the purpose for which they were originally constructed. Some blogs are used in education – and thus often have a lifespan of a semester or two; some are issue-driven and may end when that issue is resolved; indeed some are diaries, but like hardcopy diaries, they tend to get left behind after a few years.

All of those gripes aside, the article did make two good points: firstly, that the exponential rise of blogging has to slow soon (because exponential means, quite literally, that there would have to be more blogs than people within a few years at recent growth rates); and secondly that citizens of a digital culture may be shifting their focus to other platforms like YouTube and MySpace. That’s not really an argument about the death of blogging, though – it’s more testimony to the maturing of the world of social software in that many more options available for those many networks of interest and friendship which life online can facilitate.

Of course, I wonder why no one writes about how many MySpace profiles are abandoned? (Far be it from me to points out that the same folk that own MySpace own The Australian).

I guess one has to ask The Australian, if blogs are on the decline, why does your blog section keep growing?