Strangely his “websiteexperts.ie” site has been down for the last few weeks. He has been hosting it on a low end US hoster. Since he has referred to me as an ‘”expert” critic’, I find it quite ironic that a: he would consider himself a website expert and b: couldn’t keep his own website operating. Perhaps he now considers himself a worthy competitor for Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and has given up the webdesign work.

Sometimes I wonder about why the search business attracts people to it. But then the naive newbies who think that building a good search engine is easy tend to drastically outnumber cynical veterans who understand the realities in this business.

there did seem to be a general buzz in the early part of this year, which has dropped off dramatically over the last two/three months. maybe it’s just new year’s resolutions wearing out …

But in terms of Irish blogs, I think that the estimate of there being around 9000 Irish blogs is highly optimistic. Just from the work I did on it a few months ago, it was a very small set of about 1000 or so active Irish blogs and the activity was confined to a fraction of that per day.

The 9000 blogs figure does not take into account blog attrition. Many bloggers seem to get caught up in the whole buzz, frequently after an article in the traditional media. These blogs then are left to moulder after the sheer grind of writing something interesting and new every day becomes apparent. most end up commenting on other blogs or on news events.