Walt at Random

I’m delighted to see the first comment (that I’ve encountered) from someone who’s actually received Balanced Libraries: Thoughts and on Continuity and Change: Jennifer Macaulay at Life as I Know It.

Here’s what she has to say.

Before encountering this, I was just about to state my policy on comments and reviews of this book that I encounter. It’s simple:

1. I’ll link to them, by editing this post or creating another one. That’s true whether they’re positive, negative or mixed
2. I will not comment on the comments and negative reviews unless there’s a factual error, and probably not even then. I learned a long time ago that it’s bad practice for an author to respond to book reviews (of whatever nature) except to say “Thanks for reading and commenting.” Update: I will feel free to thank people for positive reviews! What I learned was not to quarrel with negative and mixed reviews. Which I won’t.

So…Jennifer, thanks for reading and commenting!

First full review, 4/20/07: This one from Pete Smith at library too. Thanks for reading and commenting. (Pete also posted the review on the Balanced Libraries book page at Lulu.com. Thanks!) Added note: Smith’s review is thoughtful–and also positive, for which I’m grateful.

Another review, 4/26/07: Jennifer Macaulay at Life as I know it writes a thoughtful and positive review. Again, I’m grateful.

The first non-English review, 5/29/07: Wow! Wouter over het Web has a lengthy review in Dutch. Wouter assures me it’s a positive review, and from Babelfish’s output, it does appear that way–although the translation leaves something to be desired. Thanks!

And a long, thoughtful review from Mark Lindner, 5/31/07: right here. I can only say Thanks and Wow!

6/7/07: Another long, thoughtful review, this time from John Dupuis. Once again, I can only say Thanks and Wow!

9/18/07: Another long, thoughtful review, this one from John Miedema. I’m posting a belated separate item on this one–and again, “Thanks and Wow!”
4/4/07: Not a review, but Sarah Houghton-Jan offers a nice writeup.

4/5/07: You’d think the author would know the subtitle of the book… Thanks, Alane! And now this: Worldcat.org’s record. I’ve made the big time!

4/9/07: Also not a review, but Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran has a nice early comment at Impromptu Librarian

6/13/08: I only spotted this mini-review by doing a little egoogling (ego-Googling). It’s on Goodreads and from “Jack”, and appears here in its entirety and without added comment:

“Generally just classic Crawford: long-winded, rambling, reactionary rhetoric. “

Walt at Random began on April 1, 2005, a day chosen with some care (OK, so the initial post was written a day earlier and postdated…)

That makes it two years old as of yesterday. Since I did two posts about the first year of the blog, it’s only reasonable to do another post about the second year. This post is a day late for reasons explained in the previous post: I said that post would stay at the top of the page for a full week, and so it did.

Not including this post, the blog has a total of 519 posts and 1,747 comments. I admit to particular pride in that ratio, more than three comments per post–high for liblogs, although nothing compared with true Big Deal bloggers in general.The second year shows fewer posts than the first, but slightly more comments: Since April 1, 2006, 247 posts and 936 comments.

Category usage hasn’t changed at the top, but has further down. That’s open data (the number after each category). For the two years as a whole, writing & blogging has the most posts (big surprise there!), followed by libraries, net media, posts related to Cites & Insights, “stuff,” and books and publishing. C&I has moved up; books and publishing have moved past movies & TV.

I’m not going to highlight particular posts. Are there any I’m sorry I posted? Not really…

The most comments for any post: 42 on “Are you reading this?”, a post that specifically requested comments (about aggregators and getting through).

Then there’s readership. Last year, one number I used was just wrong: I counted domains to represent “visitors,” where I should have used IP addresses (a much larger number, that can both overcount and undercount actual visitors). By March 2006, the blog was up to 1,064 sessions/day and 2,337 pageviews/day.

Representative months for the last year:

May 2006: 1,254 sessions/day, 3,001 pageviews/day, 6,930 IP addresses
July 2006: 1,215 sessions/day, 2,549 pageviews/day, 6,223 IP addresses
September 2006: 1,219 sessions/day, 2,393 pageviews/day, 6,303 IP addresses
November 2006: 1,389 sessions/day, 2,433 pageviews/day, 6,639 IP addresses
January 2007: 1,445 sessions/day, 3,328 pageviews/day, 7,173 IP addresses
March 2007: 1,628 sessions/day, 3,298 pageviews/day, 8,823 IP addresses

Over the past year, some 56,460 different IP addresses from 125 countries have visited this blog for a total of some 470,000 sessions. That strikes me as both impressive and really strange. The IP count is almost three times that for Cites & Insights in the nine months since it moved to citesandinsights.info.

I was “stuck at around 140 Bloglines subscribers” for the first few months of 2006. That’s changed; the current count is 445. 53% of Feedburner subscriptions are from Bloglines; I might project that this means I have about 840 total readers via aggregators, but I’m not sure that’s sound logic.

In any case, there are more readers (real or machine) than I’d expect. Which was true last year as well.

Oh, one final number: look at the Spam Karma 2 count at the bottom of the page. It’s probably over 21,000 by the time you read this. Well, Blake only installed Spam Karma 2 for me on April 11, 2006. Make of that what you will. I count an average of 58 spam attempts a day. Which could be a whole lot worse, to be sure.

Anyone who goes back to last year’s anniversary post (the first one) may note that I talked about maybe doing those CD-ROM mini-reviews here instead of in C&I. Time still hasn’t allowed…the CD-ROMs are still sitting there, my 3.5-year-old computer is now 4.5 years old, and so it goes.