Demise of the Dutch Blogosphere
Back in 2006, Dutch weblog Sargasso started following the activity of about 260 Dutch blogs that were active at the time, mainly by looking at the frequency of new postings. Earlier this week Sargasso published an update of the the status of these blogs in 2014. They summarised the results of their analysis with this fascinating visualisation1:
Each block in the figure represents one blog, where the color and the number of dots indicate how often new postings appear. Here’s the legend:
| Symbol | Posting frequency |
|---|---|
 |
High |
 |
Occasional gaps |
 |
Gaps of one or more days |
 |
Lots of large gaps |
 |
Almost dead |
 |
Casualty of war |
The really outstanding feature here is that most of these blogs are now in the “casualty of war” category. They’re simply gone; the URLs either don’t work, or they link to a completely different website. A pretty dramatic demonstration of the importance of web archiving if you ask me.
Link to original feature on Sargasso
Battle of the Blogs - The war is lost (in Dutch)
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If the visualisation doesn’t show, you may have a browser extension installed that blocks the “sargasso.nl” domain from which it is loaded. ↩
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