I didn’t find that mythical UrBlog of mine that I mentioned in the first post of the recently recovered one. The loss of something digital is weird. Since it lacks the inevitability of entropy that all other things have, it is especially infuriating. It could have been prevented.
Oh well.
During the search, I came across some other things from the past. I had written a ‘meme tracker’ in the early 2000s called BlogsNow. It would reliably detect which links gained popularity. Back then, the so-called “Blogosphere” was a crazy mix of all sorts of things.
Finding the data for it got me thinking about the status of those 7 million weblogs. How many would still be updated after two decades? I had just seen myself that it is not easy.
There are around 3500 site left that still get updated regularly. I didn’t spend too much time on the parser. There is a margin of error. But one in two thousand is a pretty strong filter.
When clicking around, I was surprised that some of the pages are rather interesting and surprising. So I added a random blog link on my main page.