Stuff On Sundays: Ghost blogs

Now that Google Reader is gone and I am settled happily into using Feedly, I decided the time was right to purge my RSS feed. I  browse by RSS feed every night after I have settled in front of the TV, it is a part of my routine that I enjoy. Over the last week I have spent about 3 hours sorting through the nearly 1000 book blogs I have followed at one time or another over the last few years.

There were really only a handful of blogs I was targeting, most commonly because I had noticed their posts had become a cycle of memes, cover reveals and book blasts for books that weren’t really of interest to me anyway.

What shocked me was the discovery of how many abandoned blogs I had in my feed.  A few blogs had a ‘goodbye’ post I must have missed, but more often than not the last post was something ordinary – a review, a meme and then nothing, sometimes for over a year. Some blogs simply hadn’t been posted to for a few weeks and in the end I deleted the feed if the blogger hadn’t posted in the last sixty to ninety days, with the odd exception (if for example they have stated they are taking a hiatus).

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened – had the blogger just lost interest or gotten too busy or was there some calamitous event like illness or death that caused them to disappear? None of the bloggers who disappeared were someone I had any sort of relationship with but I found it a bit sad really. I can’t quite imagine any situation I which I would abandon Book’d Out without notice, apart from death. I have already told my husband if something should happen to me he needs to write a brief post here to let people know, even though I can’t help wondering if anyone would really notice or even care.

I was curious so I googled ‘abandoned (or ghost) blogs’ and learnt that up to 95% of blogs on the web are abandoned (ie. have not been posted on in over 120 days) – that is more than 10 million blogs!  Apparently blogger and blogspot addresses NEVER expire. Blogger states ” Occasionally people come back to their blogs after long absences, and we want them to be able to find their blog as they left it.” WordPress has the same policy. I even found a blogger who blogs about “Orphaned, Lost and Abandoned Blogs”.

So I would like to know, under what circumstances would you abandon your blog? How long would it be before you would consider a blog abandoned and delete it from your feed/blogroll/subscription?

Oh and if you would like to add my feed to your reader

http://www.bookdout.wordpress.com/feed/