Should Blogs Have an Expiration Date?

The other night I found myself clicking through the blogroll. By this I mean clicking on the "next blog" button at the top of the page. This habitually addictive behavior began last week and much as I hate to say it I find myself drawn to peek just one more time at what's next.

 Regardless, that brings me to the topic of the blog graveyard. More than once while playing this game I've stumbled into a string of blog posts from three, four, even five years ago. Blogs written with flair for months, then abandoned for more pressing matters. Blogs created for a cause but never fulfilled to their legacy. Blogs posted fastidiously until 2009 and then...Wait, 2009? Exactly. They're dead as door nails. Shut them down. They occupy and clutter too much blog space. And the sheer number of title and names that they claim and broadcast to the keyword choked internet is staggering.

Believing that I was not the first to figure this out I searched for what others might have said about this and in the process got an education. The Google search results were eyeopening. They were old blog posts. I searched for the words; blog, life, cycle. and the first page of Google bares two "Google plus authorship" results from Problogger and Wired. Problogger's 2008 post Understanding the Blog Lifecycle to Prevent Common Downfalls is actually very informative and worth the read but I can't help wondering what might have changed in the last five years. The other post from Wired was wonderful, from 2007, called The Lifecycle of a Blog Post. Again, is there anything new out there?

Google has the position of control over this. The obvious answer will be a policy which addresses blog dormancy and dissolution. I expect that to happen sooner than later as the number of blogs created daily continues to grow.