many of them, of course, found my blog because either i commented on a post somewhere, or because i did some shameless plugging on a yahoogroup. but that was after a few months of blogging when i felt more confident about what i was doing.

in the first few months, i saw that i had some readers. i didn’t know who or where they were, but they were there. it was not until i became part of a yahoogroup that i found out that one of the members had actually recommended my blog to the group! and when i wrote to the member who enthusiastically made the recommendation to thank her, i also asked, “how’d you find my blog?” and her answer? “google.” it seems that i chose the right, google-friendly title for my blog.

Should I use different discovery tools next time (ITIANT, the constant disclaimer: If There Is A Next Time)? Suggestions? How big a pool is reasonable?

At this point in the ongoing discussion–which I’m certainly not trying to shut down, ’cause it’s fascinating, and will be interesting to try to meld into a followup essay–I’m convinced that the overall effect has been to the good, if only because I’ve seen a number of posts on “interesting blogs you might not have heard of–and why they’re interesting.” But I’m biased…

I also was aware of many of the blogs in the published report, but some were new to me. Now that I’ve gone and looked at the spreadsheet I see there are quite a few I was not aware of before. So, thanks for that Walt!

That, though, brought up another issue. I, for one, am not thin-skinned enough to worry if I was in “the list” or not. In fact, I’d be kind of worried about the state of the biblioblogosphere if I were. But to find that I’m not even in the ‘small l’ list at all is a bit different. Maybe it’s those darn ellipses in my blog title since only one blog that does not start with a letter is listed in any of the indexes. Or, now that I look again, maybe I have to submit my URL to the indexes to be indexed. Oh well, just another minor methodological issue to consider. How many other newish blogger, like me, don’t know we have to “advertise” in the indexes.

This is not a criticism on my part Walt, because I am comfortable with where I am in the conversation; just something to consider. So, thanks again for doing the study Walt! I have learned many things from it.

Maybe a project for someone else. To me, that would be trading a hornet’s nest for quicksand… Automated content analysis makes me nervous (as a writer and a rhetoric major), and for me to apply it to library-related blogs would be, well…just not going to happen here.

Your methodology has much in common with content analysis. Perhaps in your followup study you could use some existing software (eg http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/content/) to analyse what people are talking about and when.

I don’t think there’s anything inherantly wrong with rankings, after all the subscriber numbers in Bloglines shattered the myth that no one knew who was most read some time ago. Though I do think that a further study is required to interpret that data further. I don’t think there is a hierarchy in library blogs, as your results show it is relatively easy for some new ones to gain an audience.

It’s great to see people suggesting who else to read – this was also recommended by the Blogtalk conference I attended, who somewhat controversially also recommended that people remove ‘A-listers’ from their blogrolls.

As for not wanting to throw away work you’ve spent a lot of time on – I know how that feels! I’ve been working on a content analysis of newspaper articles for two years on and off, and while I can’t bring myself to finish it, I can’t throw it away either.