Newmark's Door

Happy Fourth of July

No posts today and tomorrow. See you on Monday.

"Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest"

From the New York Times, 6/5:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

Not me. When I started in April 2002, I figured my immediate family would read occasionally and maybe--maybe--one or two other people.

That was 8410 posts and 7126 non-spam comments ago.

"100 Awesome Blogs by Some of the World's Smartest People"

I've only looked at about twenty of these, and of those twenty, I'd recommend most highly Joel on Software and Carpe Diem.

A blog to watch

"Contrarian Journal: the Journal of an Independent Mind". By Reuben Moore, Managing Director of Brick and Garden Real Estate.

Although we haven't met, Mr. Moore is clearly a scholar and a gentleman, as evidenced by his May 13 entry.

Blogs for startups

From "Venture Hacks: Advice for Entrepreneurs".

Why aren't there more German econobloggers?

Felix Salmon opines.

(I'd be more convinced if he had evidence that it isn't simply a U.S. vs. non-U.S. thing.)

Another one for "markets in everything" (TM, Marginal Revolution)

The New York Times reports on a website that matches "sugar daddies" with "sugar babies". That is, men who want to keep and women who want to be kept.

What will they think of next?

By the way, here's a website devoted solely to indexing Marginal Revolution's "markets in everything" posts. (433 at last count.)

You can tell a blog's readers by the company they keep

Or something like that.

According to Quantcast, readers of Marginal Revolution also visit the sites of the Weekly Standard, The Atlantic--probably Megan McArdle's blog--and National Review.

Barry Ritholtz's readers also visit Baseline Scenario and the New Yorker.

Brad Delong's readers visit a whole bunch of left-wing blogs. 

And what about the readers of Greg Mankiw's excellent blog? They really like Fark.

'Nuff said. :-)

Oh, and what about the readers of the blog you're currently visiting? Well, it apparently has a big following in Louth, Ireland, the "Wee County". I haven't a clue why. But if they're here, a big hello to my Irish readers. (I know of one reader in Ireland--hello, William!--but he works quite some distance away from Louth.)

More on Quantcast in the second half of this article.

Blogger personality types

Justin Wehr summarizes the results of analyzing some particular blogs using the Myers-Brigg personality scheme.

I never thought that the four-letter MB scheme was useful, but I admit it's got me pegged pretty well.

Two links from economist Justin Wehr's blog, "Wehr in the World"

"Calorie distributions of 22 popular restaurants".

And via Justin, "Why We Procrastinate and How to Stop".