Comments on: Liblog landscape: Opinions requested

By: walt

walt — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:34:58 +0000

Opinion? I don’t know that there will be a lot of opinion in this study. Analysis, yes, at least some of it.

As to your hope, John, given lack of sponsorship and lack of anything like a full-time income, I’m not sure I can justify giving away several hundred hours of work. Yes, there will be a list (either Excel or a page with hotlinks) of all the blogs included in the study. But the master spreadsheet…well, if there are enough book sales or other revenue to represent even California minimum wage for the time spent, maybe I’d post the spreadsheet. Things were different when I was fully employed. The effort involved in this study may be a fool’s errand, but I’m not sure I’m ready to compound the foolishness by giving it away up front.

By: John Dupuis

John Dupuis — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:42:51 +0000

I agree. Less is more. Personally I’m much more interested in your analysis and opinion than in the data tables. I’m not sure if you could get away with leaving them out entirely, but even using a smaller font to reduce the page count would be ok.

I do hope that you’ll put as complete a table as you have online somewhere. If I recall correctly, you did that with one of the other studies and I did end up playing around with the table a little.

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:16:44 +0000

Thanks for posting the example, Walt. That helped in thinking about it. I agree with Michelle and Jennifer about leaving out those three metrics. I think this is a case of “more is less” and the results will be clearer.

By: Jennifer Macaulay

Jennifer Macaulay — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:44:38 +0000

I would have to agree with Michelle. I don’t think much would be lost. Overall, post length and comments per post are probably much more meaningful. I am also looking forward to the finished product!

By: walt

walt — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:27:22 +0000

Thanks, Michelle. While I suspect sponsorship won’t happen, in a way that’s too bad: Based on what I see so far, I think this is going to be a really interesting and useful piece of work–and it may only reach a few dozen or (cross fingers) few hundred people.

The most useful part of the book will, I think, be the first X chapters (X is probably 10, but I’m not quite sure yet), maybe 100 pages, maybe more…but without the profiles, it would be woefully incomplete.

By: Michelle McLean

Michelle McLean — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:33:09 +0000

I don’t see that anything will be lost. Go with your amended list – it will still be very useful.

Thanks for all your work – I really appreciate this big picture look at library blogging.