I don't think that coins with 0 volume are dead, but in some cases either inaccessible, hard to access, or lack of interest/development at this given time. All it will really take is Bitcoin to go up 10 fold and you'll have every Sally and Joe on the block working on 'CrapCoinClassic' again =]
But today is different, if the coins that have no volume at all, it will be very difficult to make an increase in volume again even though bitcoin has increased up to 10 times, because coins that have no interested ones, will be difficult to develop again by the dev .