I deliberately avoided attempting to define “the slant of the blog”s after the brouhaha from my 2005 discussion–and, frankly, because it’s hard to define the “slant” of many liblogs. I offered the subtitle/slogan when there was one, the title of the first post of the quarter studied, and (when comments were enabled) the title of the post with the most comments; those were intended to provide hints as to what the blog was about. Otherwise, given feeds and the relatively low frequency with which most libloggers post, I think it makes sense to subscribe to anything potentially interesting and later unsub if it proves not to be interesting.

As for live links: C&I is primarily intended for print; the HTML sections are dumbed-down versions of the PDF. I don’t include links. This one’s actually an extreme case,and I almost didn’t do the HTML version at all–because the HTML version requires 48 pages to print out, where the PDF requires 32 (including a small essay that’s not part of the HTML version). So it’s wasteful to print out the HTML version, and I think it’s far too long to be read on the screen.

However, as I say in the article (and as you may have missed if you were reading it on the screen…)

“An Excel workbook including all 213 blogs (with URL as of early July 2006), start date (in an artificial “ymm” notation, where April 2006 is “604”), post count, comments, and comments per post, with a second spreadsheet including the 198 blogs that have length measures—showing count, length, and length per post—is available at http://waltcrawford.name/ liblogs2006.xls.”

There’s a separate workbook–also mentioned in the article–containing reach figures, but that one may not include the URLs.