Hard Evidence of the Declining Relevance of Blogging?

According to Wikipedia, "[a]n n-gram is a sequence of n adjacent symbols in a particular order"--for instance, that particular order of adjacent symbols that are the letters making up a word or phrase, which is the kind of sequence with which I am concerned at the moment. The Google Books' "Ngram Viewer" measures the frequency of the use of a word or phrase in the vast body of digitized books in that system over time, which the Viewer presents in the form of a graph for the share the word or phrase of the amassed texts by year going all the way from 1800 to 2022. This makes looking at the figures the Viewer provides for particular keywords a handy way of seeing whether particular subjects or ideas have come to be more or less widely discussed over time which I have found consistent with my experience. For example, it seems telling that the Ngram viewer scores for the terms "woke," "new normal" and "remote work" exploded in recent years--and "narcissism" and "kakistocracy" too--all as usage of the term "democratic peace theory" fell hard over a period in which the end-of-history delusions of the post-Cold War period receded into the past.

Considering just where blogging stands in our online life today it seemed plausible that the Ngram viewer could provide some insight, and so I went ahead and plugged in "blog" and "blogosphere"--the latter term, denoting the totality of blogs, and those who interact with them, understood by its users to comprise a space, a culture both revealing and formative of public opinion in sufficient degree that what is going on in said "sphere" matters. As it happened the use of the word "blog" peaked in 2012 with a score of 0.00076, and plunged all the way through the following decade, with a score of 0.00057 for the last recorded year, 2022--a rough one-quarter drop in incidence. The fall in the usage of that derivative of "blog," "blogosphere," was even more pronounced. Peaking in 2011 with a score of 0.000028 in 2022 its score stood at 0.0000096--a two-thirds drop in incidence.

It does not seem wholly unreasonable to infer from this that blogs are less spoken of, and the blogosphere much less spoken of, by book authors after 2011-2012 because blogs singly and the blogosphere generally simply became less important to our online life afterward--the more in as this judgment would seem to align with a great deal of other information and analysis about the character of online life today. For the same reason I would imagine that the fall in the words' Ngram scores did not bottom out in 2022, but continued through 2023, 2024 and 2025, and that we will see this confirmed when scores become available for those years--and the years after them as the results of the search engine algorithm changes, the turning of many from search engines to answer engines, and a good many other developments in the way in which we access the web increasingly register in the ever-lagging analysis. This will not be because those developments will have compelled those who think about any relevant matter to think about the blog's importance, but simply because it will be less and less the case that the blog, let alone the collectivity of the blogosphere, will force themselves on their attention. Still less will they give any thought to the bigger story of which the withering of blogging is merely a part--namely the death of what little hope there had ever been for the democratization of participation in our cultural and political life via the "actually existing" web. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that the great majority of the members of that very small social stratum which is in a position to write books that may actually get read has never cared for that hope, indeed seen it as a threat, maligned it endlessly in their public statements, and I suspect, to the extent that they think about the matter at all now, gloat over what has come to pass as they hail the Overlords of Big Media and Big Tech whose, in lieu of a more accurate but less socially acceptable term, claqueurs and courtiers they are.