I actually started a book review of Being Analog, then I lost the book in a stack in my bedroom. It finally emerged last week. So, maybe I’ll get round to finishing and posting the review in the next few weeks. Not that I have the same name recognition as Steve Coffman.

Nah, I’m not counting the LISNews “blog lites” as blogs. Just as I’m not counting LISNews itself–partly because I don’t think it’s a blog, partly because it has considerably more than four authors.

Thanks for the kind words about Being Analog–and particularly re the numeracy chapter. I still remember that Steve Coffman savaged me for that chapter in his review of the book, basically saying that no librarian could possibly not know all this stuff.

Thanks for your research and writing, always interesting.

Completely off topic, I finished reading Being Analog a few months back. Still really relevant to discussions on the digital future. Plus your section on numbers literacy should be required reading in all Library School “Intro to Research Methods” classes.

Oh, there will be loads of personal observations–it’s C&I, after all–but, well, there’s one high-profile case that I’m just not ready to tackle. Neither is anyone else, apparently. I even wrote a blind item in my LISNews journal. Thought about it. And didn’t press Save. So I’m going to be light on “judgmental” commentary. This time around.

If I had all the time in the world, I’d love to extend the study to, say, the “top 100″ in my Reach calculus–but as it is, this article far exceeds my usual “one hour per thousand words” guideline; it’ll run around 6,000-7,000 words, and I’ve put at least 20 hours of effort into it. Worth it, maybe. We’ll see.

I’m looking forward to the article, it sounds interesting. Although I tend to like personal observations

Should be an interesting article. I look forward to it. Shame these metrics have to be so hard to compile, but I suppose there’s no other way unless you want to depend on self-report.

If you need a blogger to pick on, you know I won’t bite you.

As for how gung-ho I am: Not that gung-ho. Just as I deliberately limited Bloglines feeds to a maximum of three for any weblog, trying to pick the most obvious candidates. I’ve already concluded that any single measure of a weblog is likely to be wildly misleading–and, for that matter, that any combination of measures provides indication, not validation.

I’ve actually finished (almost all of) the research now and am writing up the results and observations along the way. The report, which will be the feature article in the September C&I, will not have a big chart purporting to show exact importance rankings or anything of the sort; it will have a variety of metrics describing the group of blogs fully studied (which total 60 in all, out of the 239 I started with). And I’m removing the personal observations I was starting to make about some blogs, because I don’t need the grief–particularly from the one case where I honestly don’t know what to make of the changes in a blogger’s personality.

Searching on the blog (not feed) URL instead of trying to use Bloglines’ list (what were they thinking?) probably works.

If you’re really gung-ho, you can try searching LiveJournal for feeds aggregated there. Good luck, though; LJ’s search is worse even than any OPAC I’ve ever used. Best you can do is ask people to tell you if they’re aggregated over there. (I am. 17 LJ subscribers.)

The problem with Blogpulse is that it’s so much “of the minute,” fine if that’s what you’re looking for–also a problem with Technorati. Of course, this is all nonsense, but I think the article will be interesting nonsense. Now, off to do more investigation…