Walt at Random

I’ve done all the scanning I’m planning to do, looking for liblogs (that is, blogs by library people, as opposed to official library blogs). I’ve found 1,277 liblogs, and checked and excluded another 1,308 things that aren’t liblogs.

It’s Your Turn

I know I’m not going to get everything. That became fairly clear when, on checking 83 possibilities from eight blogrolls added while checking mostly-defunct liblogs, I came up with 31 legitimate liblogs…

I also know I’m not going to go through any more iterations.

So: If you know of liblogs I haven’t included, you’re invited to let me know between now and September 15, 2010.

What’s a liblog?

For the purposes of the current project, the most inclusive I’ve done, here are the criteria:

• The blog must be available on the web without using passwords or special permissions.
• Most posts in the blog must be in English.
• There must be at least one post prior to June 1, 2010 (that is, no later than May 31, 2010).
• The blog should be by a self-identified “library person” or group of people, not explicitly identified as not at all relating to libraries, or somehow related to libraries…but:
• The blog should not be an “official blog” from a library or a library-related group. (If you’re in doubt, include it.)

Please, Before Submitting Any Candidates…

• Check this page — Liblogs 2010 (with exclusions) — DRAFT. Use your browser’s Find function to check the name. (The list is in alphabetic order, but it’s idiot alpha order, with a few “A ” entries and a lot of “The ” entries. And, of course, cute punctuation can change sorting.)
• [Added 8/31/10:] If you see a blog twice, under a current name and an old name, that’s OK: In order to maintain my sanity while checking candidates, I include older names of renamed blogs in the exclusions list, under the “Renamed” category. There are 115 older names in the list as of now.

If You Have Candidates…

• Add a comment, with the blog name and URL–but give the URL as text, not as a link (omit the http://), and don’t combine the blog name with a link. (Why not? Because, particularly if you have more than one, it will cause Spam Karma 2 to flag it as spam–and with more than 100 spamments today, I’m not sure I’ll be able to sort through all the spam looking for legit posts.)
• Or send me email, waltcrawford at gmail dot com, using the same rules.

Sending candidates doesn’t guarantee they’ll be included–and since this project won’t involve blog profiles, it may not matter as much. Still, it will almost certainly be the most comprehensive look at English-language liblogs ever done, so it wouldn’t hurt…

Thanks. Now back to the Open Access project (and dealing with a keyed car, and, and, and…)

The good news: I’ve started in on The New Project (a fast-turnaround, relatively brief book for a real library publisher, on a topic I’m quite comfortable with–more later). First of six chapters has a good rough draft in place. Second of six chapters has the first half of a very good rough draft, and I expect to do the second half tomorrow.

The odd news: I haven’t entirely set aside the Liblog Project (here’s the most recent post, which links to the others). It was the kind of thing I could work on after mowing the lawn in 88F weather (which was too tiring to focus on real writing) and in logical pauses during the writing. Here’s what’s happened:

• I decided to change the boundaries for the “deep look” so that it includes blogs with GPR of 3 (of which there were apparently 83, but really 81) and, after looking at them more, blogs with only one post during March-May 2010 (of which there were 67). So I’ve added the comment counts and length totals for 2010 and, where not already there, earlier post counts, comment counts and length totals for March-May 2007, 2008 and 2009 as appropriate.
• While doing that, I started cutting-and-pasting blogrolls that appeared to be library-oriented and consisted only of blog links (there’s a new breed of blogroll that includes the latest headline and date for each blog; WAY too much work to strip down to links, and glancing at most of them says all or nearly all are already in the study).
• So far, 22 of the 148 blogs had usable blogrolls (that weren’t obviously all repeats). The list of unsorted, unchecked candidates is 543 blogs. After Chapter 2 is done (and the Wednesday hike, and other stuff, and maybe Chapter 3), I’ll do the sort/dedupe/check step and, assuming anything’s left, check the remaining candidates. If I get more than, say, 4 or 5 new-to-me liblogs out of that process, I might continue picking up blogrolls. If not, not.

I also realized that I really have four groups of liblogs and that some portions of the analysis and narrative ought to treat them as four separate groups, not just two groups. As things stand, the four groups–which don’t include the 720 “not liblogs” that will be treated summarily–look like this:

• Group 1: Fairly active and fairly visible blogs. Liblogs with a Google Page Rank of 4 or higher that have at least three posts between March 1 and May 31, 2010. So far, there are 394 of those.
• Group 2: Less active or less visible blogs. Liblogs with Google Page Rank 3 or that had only one or two posts during the quarter. So far, there are 156 of those. The combination of Groups 1 and 2 constitutes the Deep Look pool, 550 liblogs in total. (So the comment somebody made that “there seem to be around 500 active liblogs” seems to be right enough for jazz…)
• Group 3: Probably alive but relatively inactive or invisible. Basically, these are all the liblogs that don’t qualify for the Deep Look but that seem to still be around. That includes active blogs with Google Page Rank lower than 3, blogs with no posts during the quarter but at least one post since December 1, 2009, and blogs with no posts during the half-year between December 1 and May 31, but with at least one post since May 31, 2010. There are 210 of these.
• Group 4: Canceled or deeply moribund. (Canceled blogs only appear here if they didn’t qualify for Group 1 or Group 2: A liblog that’s explicitly canceled during or after March 1-May 31 is considered active for that quarter. There are a small handful of those.) These are blogs with either explicit cancellations prior to March 1, 2010 or no sign of activity for at least seven or eight months (that is, nothing since November 2009, given that testing was done in late July and early August 2010). There are 310 of these–and that doesn’t include, to be sure, a few hundred blogs that have disappeared entirely or gone behind firewalls.

I may be almost done with the data gathering. Data analysis and writing up an interesting narrative–and I think there will be lots of interesting things out of this very broad look–will come, well, when it comes.

Now, back to the book project…

As for Cites & Insights, where I’m still apparently on a writing break: There will certainly be a September 2010 issue. Whether it will appear in late August or early September: Still unknown. Whether it will be new material or a large chunk of But Still They Blog: Still unknown.

[Whether even the tiny trip we were planning this month will happen: Still unknown. That's a whole different can of worms. Meanwhile, I think we're now safely above 95% electric generation for the year, since the total from PG&E is now down below 150kWh and the photovoltaic system has generated considerably more than 3,000 kWh...even though, thanks partly to a neighboring palm tree that keeps feeding lots of pollen to our cars and to the panels, we never did reach 18kWh per day.]

What’s that you say? How can this be Update 2 when you haven’t seen “Liblogs 2010″ as the title of any previous post? All I can do is quote ol’ Ralph Waldo:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”

Yes, I know, I’d thought it was the more general (and more nonsensical) “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”; this version has the virtues of (a) apparently being the correct quotation and (b) making a lot more sense.

Anyway…this is an update to “The new project: update 1,” which was an update to “We grow too soon old...”

I guess calling it “Liblogs 2010″ means I’m fairly certain I’m not going to abandon the project. Which, at this point, is true–barring some wonderful new paying opportunity that requires too much time. (I hope to start on one paying project very soon and to convert something else into a paying project–but both of those would leave enough time to continue this project after some delay.)

The candidates

I’ve completed the scan of 868 “candidates” from LISWiki, the ODP list of librarian blogs, the LISZen source list, Meredith Farkas’ “Favorite Blogs” list, Davey P’s “HotStuff” list and the Salem Press list–which began as 2,911 possibilities that boiled down to 868 after eliminating duplicates, items among the 606 liblogs (and 71 exclusions) that were either in previous studies or already identified from my Bloglines subscriptions, and items obviously not in English. The breakdown of those directories before deduping:

• Salem Press: 318
• LISWiki: 743
• ODP: 138
• LISZen: 795
• Hot Stuff: 748
• Farkas: 179.

The results

I found 415 more liblogs for the “broad look”–that is, English-language (or predominantly English-language) blogs by “library people” or somehow related to libraries, that aren’t official blogs (or at least don’t function as official blogs) and have at least one post visible on the web, no matter how old. The running total is now 1,021 liblogs for the broad look.

I also added 426 excluded candidates–names/addresses that aren’t visible (either deleted or password-protected), blogs not in English, official blogs, blogs with no apparent relation to libraries or library people, and blogs that have been incorporated into newer, renamed blogs.

Hmm. 426+415=841. The other 27 cases were either my mistakes (failing to delete blogs already there) or naming differences (the same blog appearing two or three times under different names).

Slightly more detailed results

Here’s how the 497 excluded candidates break down by reason, as I recorded them:

• Ten empty, blank, or dummy pages–some of them potential blogs but with no content at all. One had a single picture, nothing else.
• One malware site, popping up all sorts of windows asserting that my PC has viruses: Thanks a lot, Information Knot.
• 26 sites that aren’t blogs–including aggregators, newsletters and a variety of other things.
• 58 blogs that aren’t in English (as judged based on the first page of posts, except for all the posts in Farsi where the page title was enough… in one or two cases, where there are a handful of English posts among mostly-non-English posts, it was a judgment call)
• 62 blogs for which I could find no plausible library or librarian connection, either in the author info or categories or posts. I tended to err on the side of inclusion.
• 164 not viewable–mostly sites that have simply disappeared, but with a large handful of password-protected sites. I’m guessing that nearly all of these were liblogs at some point.
• 99 official blogs, including both library blogs and association/company blogs that appear to function as official publications. I also tended to err on the side of inclusion here, that is, if a blog had a library abbreviation (or ALA division or whatever) in its URL but was clearly the work of individuals who disclaimed organizational responsibility, I left it in the broad look.
• 77 renamed–blogs that have been incorporated into, or in a few cases, followed by, newer liblogs with different names.

I think that adds up to around 241 “former liblogs,” but that number might be high, since some not-viewable blogs may also be excludable for other reasons.

What about the broader look? Here’s an early summary:

• 597 liblogs have two or more posts during the March 1, 2010-May 31, 2010 test period. Another 63 have exactly one post during the quarter; at present, I don’t plan to include those in the deeper look.
• Of that 597, 417 have a Google Page Rank of 4 or higher–and, currently, those are the 417 I plan to use for the deeper look. Which is to say: I’ve recorded count, length, and comments for March-May 2010 (and going back to 2007) to the extent feasible for each of those blogs. I could add another 71 blogs with GPR 3, if I’m willing to do the extra metrics for those (in 19 cases, most of the metrics are there from earlier studies). It’s very unlikely that I’d add the 21 blogs with GPR 2, the six with GPR 1 (something I’ve almost never seen before, actually), or the 75 with GPR 0 (which can happen because a blog changes platforms or because it’s a corporate-platform blog and gets no link love on its own).
• So it appears that at least 660 liblogs are at least marginally active in 2010–and that a deep look could involve anywhere from 417 to 492 liblogs. There were 449 liblogs with countable posts in the 2009 study (including some two dozen with just one post), as a point of comparison.
• I have recorded blogging software when that was visible, but I’m going to recheck two dozen of the blogs where I recorded “other” as the software, before I started viewing source in cases where the software wasn’t obvious….and maybe 26 “unknown” that didn’t seem to be using any canned package.
• I recorded the country in which the blog was being written, when that was clear, and show 25 different countries.

What’s next?

Right away, nothing at all–I’m going to do some other work.

Then, well, it depends on other projects and energy.

• I’m likely to do the cut-and-paste trick with the some or all of the directories noted in LibWorld – library blogging worldwide. Although it’s fair to assume most of those blogs are either already in the spreadsheet or are non-English, there might be some exceptions.
• If I have loads of energy, I might cut-and-paste the first, say, 50 library-related blogrolls from blogs already in the deep study (or otherwise current), and see whether there’s enough yield to be worthwhile.
• I know that it’s not possible to say “here’s the universe”–but I suspect it will be fair to say that the final broad look will represent a very large majority of the English-language non-official liblog universe, at least of those blogs that have left any trace at all…
• And then, probably late this fall, possibly in early 2011, I’ll start working with the spreadsheet to prepare a new report, one that will probably come out as a (not quite so thick) book, with some details emerging here or in Cites & Insights. There’s quite a bit to be said about the broad range–after all, all I’m missing is length of posts and comment count for 2010, and pre-2010 metrics–and even more about the deep range and comparisons between the two.

Casual observations

I seem to have encountered a lot of blogs this year that I never encountered or at least didn’t include in earlier studies. I’m guessing that’s partly because blogs tend to gain GPR over time, partly because the Salem list actually includes quite a few blogs that aren’t in other directories, partly because the other directories have improved.

Quick observations:

• “PLN” seems to be a term that’s automatically understood to mean Personal Learning Network by many (most?) school library bloggers–and not, I think, by most others. I can assure you that the PALINET Leadership Network would not have had “PLN Highlights” as its alert blog name if that TLA (three-letter acronym in this case) was universally understood–or even prevalent outside of school librarianship.
• Either Will Manley or one of the commenters on his blog made a comment about this being the golden age of book reviews. Quite apart from Amazon and LibraryThing, I think that’s true, based on the number of high-quality, prolific book-review liblogs I’ve encountered this time around…particularly for YA and children’s literature, but also for books in general.
• Oh, in case you didn’t catch that: I did not require “active since December 2009″ this time around, and I’ve recorded the starting month and lifespan for a good many blogs that weren’t around very long. Yes, Will Unwound is part of the deep study despite its January 2010 start date…and a total of ten liblogs that began in 2010 are part of the broad study. Of course, they had to have begun by May 2010, since May 31 is the cutoff point for all observations.
• What I’ve derided as The World’s Worst Blogging Platform, the LJ/SLJ construct, now turns out to be built on what I regard as the world’s best blogging software–but also the software that can be used to screw up a blog’s presentation perhaps more thoroughly than any other. That’s right: the LJ/SLJ blogs now use WordPress. So does this one, and I have no intention of changing. (I’ve encountered exactly one liblogger who explicitly moved away from WordPress–to Blogger. There may be others.)

Whew. That’s a lot more than I intended to say. So far, my promotional posts for But Still They Blog have been a total washout, with zero additional copies sold. So, you know, I’m aware that doing this 2010 study is unlikely to be remunerative…but it is fascinating.

I thought I’d update this post, now that I’ve spent a few hours days on the scan of 868 possible candidate blogs.

Then

I started out with 606 liblogs (English, visible–that is, reachable on the web, not official, somehow related to libraries or librarians) and 71 “rejects” (blogs that had been on my radar at some point but were either non-English-language, had wholly disappeared from the web, or were actually official blogs)–and 868 candidates, combined and filtered from 2,911 listings in six directories.

I guesstimated that I’d find 200 to 400 more liblogs from among those 868, but had no idea what the number would actually be. I also had no idea whether the process would be so grueling that I’d give up partway through–after all, there’s no economic incentive to complete this, just curiosity.

Now

I’m now almost through the “I”s in that crude-alphabetic list of 868 (“crude-alphabetic”: there were several “A something” blogs and there will be a LOT of “The something” blogs).

• There are 551 candidates left to check, so I’ve apparently done 317. In other words, I’m a little more than a third of the way done.
• It’s clearly feasible to do this. It’s not fast–I haven’t been doing any other writing this week–but it’s not so grueling as to be hopeless. I’ll certainly finish this scan, although not necessarily this month.
• It’s essentially impossible to estimate the time required, particularly since I’m backfilling data for newly-discovered blogs that go back more than one year. I might be able to check 30 blogs in one hour (if half of them are non-English, official, or disappeared and most of the rest were only there briefly); I might require more than half an hour just to handle one blog (say a 5-year-old Kidlit or YA lit blog with an enthusiastic audience). I’m guessing it averages about 20/hour overall, but that’s a very crude guess.
• At this point, there are 749 blogs on the broad-survey list and 229 excluded candidates. That’s an increase of 143 blogs and 158 exclusions. If the same ratio runs through the rest of the candidates, I’ll wind up adding just about 400 total (plus another almost-300 exclusions). That would mean roughly a thousand liblogs in the broad survey.

Future

Since I’ll start working on C&I again soon, and I hope to begin another (more lucrative) project in a week or so, this might go on the back burner–but I’m also interested in seeing how it goes (e.g., what percentage of those 1,000-or-so liblogs will turn out to be currently active?).

Assuming I come back to this, it now seems likely that I’ll make up a new list from the various national liblog directories in LibWorld (assuming some of them are still around and updated) and check that list. It’s less certain that I’ll try blogrolls, but who knows? It’s clearly not possible to be sure I’ve seen the whole universe; it’s not clear whether assembling blogrolls from 100 or 200 or 500 liblogs will yield any significant number of blogs not otherwise discovered.

Meanwhile, I suspect that I will include portions of But Still They Blog in Cites & Insights–but almost certainly not the whole non-profile manuscript, at least not in one big issue. So far, my new attempts at publicizing the book have yielded exactly zero sales, but that could change…

More bits & pieces from But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009–this time, pages 9-10 and part of 11, plus three blogs from page 19.

Blogging Platforms and Programs

How do library people blog? Any blanket statement will be wrong, particularly since the whole universe of liblogs may be unknowable. For the blogs in this study, here’s the breakdown.

Program	Blogs	Percentage
WordPress	245	47.2%
Blogger	190	36.6%
TypePad/MovableType	48	9.2%
Other	24	4.6%
Drupal	7	1.3%
LiveJournal	5	1.0%

Table 1.2: Blogging platforms and programs

WordPress is close to a majority and certainly accounts for a large plurality of the blogs. Oddly enough, as compared to the 2008 study, Blogger has precisely the same percentage (36.6%) albeit of a smaller universe, but WordPress has jumped from roughly 38% to roughly 47% (and increased in real numbers), while TypePad and MovableType decreased in real numbers and increased from 8.8% to 9.2%. (I’ve lumped MovableType and TypePad together since both are similar products from the same company.) “Other” includes a few identified programs and platforms with no more than two blogs each—and a number of blogs that are either handcrafted or shorn of brand identity.

My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that a broader study, including short-lived and less visible blogs, would show a higher percentage of Blogger blogs, most of them on blogspot.com. While it’s trivially easy to set up a hosted blog at Blogspot.com, WordPress.com or Typepad.com, I believe Blogspot is perceived as being the fastest and easiest of the three. (Some Blogger blogs above are not hosted on Blogspot.com—and I’d guess most of the WordPress liblogs use WordPress software on other sites.)

There has been a slow migration of blogs to WordPress. I believe it’s safe to say that WordPress software is the preferred blogging platform for most long-term “serious” bloggers. I see very few people migrating elsewhere (except, for example, forced migrations to MovableType because people move blogs to shared services such as ScienceBlogs). But I have nothing more than anecdotal evidence—that, and the near-majority numbers above.

If you’re a numbers person, you may note that the numbers above don’t add up to 521. In the two weeks between completing the scan of blogs for metrics and doing a second scan for blogging platforms, two blogs had become unavailable, temporarily or permanently.

Currency

How current are liblogs? I used March-May 2009 for metrics—but I recorded those metrics in September 2009. To get a checkpoint, I checked each blog on September 30, 2009, looking for the most recent post but rounding down to week intervals—and beyond that, to spans that seem indicative.

Here are the results, which require some explanation.

Weeks	Blogs	Percentage	Cumulative
1	218	42.0%	42.0%
2	51	9.8%	51.8%
4	56	10.8%	62.6%
8	49	9.4%	72.1%
13	24	4.6%	76.7%
17	14	2.7%	79.4%
26	22	4.2%	83.6%
52	34	6.6%	90.2%
99	29	5.6%	95.8%
Ceased	22	4.2%

Table 1.3: Currency of most recent post as of September 30, 2009

I marked a blog as Ceased if there was an explicit declaration that there would be no new posts—no matter how recent that declaration was. (Here again, the universe is 519, missing two blogs that seem to have vanished.) Other than that:

• More than 40% of the blogs are robust—they had a post within the most recent week.
• Just over half the blogs are active—with a post somewhere within the most recent fortnight.
• Stepping back at larger intervals, it’s interesting that the number with posts sometime during the month (but not in the most recent fortnight) and those with posts sometime in August are fairly close to the “week before last” group.
• “13” indicates sometime within the last quarter (13 weeks). More than three-quarters of the blogs had a post within the summer quarter (July-September).
• I include “17” (actually four months) because Technorati uses that cutoff for blogs that could be considered alive. Roughly 80% of liblogs had a post between June 1 and September 30, 2009.
• The next two levels are half-year and year marks—in both cases representing blogs that are neither active nor clearly dead.
• “99” really means “more than 52”—that is, blogs that haven’t explicitly ceased but haven’t had a post in more than a year.

Profiles

Lady Crumpet’s Armoire

Began July 2002.

Metrics	2007	2008
Posts	12	2
Quintile	4	5
Words per post	130	40
Quintile	5	5
Comments per post	0.8	0.0
Quintile	3	5

No announcement of hiatus or dropping the blog, but the most recent post was on August 20, 2008.

beSpacific

“Accurate, focused law and technology news.” By Sabrina Pacifici. Began August 2002.

Metrics	2007	2008	2009	C08-09	C07-09
Posts	736	770	733	-5%%	0%
Quintile	1	1	1	2	1
Words per post	122	133	137	3%	13%
Quintile	5	5	5	3	3

Purely professional with no distinctive authorial voice. Does this belong in a liblog study? It’s a prolific set of very brief descriptions of, and links to, news items done by a special librarian. But it’s in blog form, Pacifici calls it a blog, and she is a librarian, so. Note the remarkable consistency over the years.

etc.

“the last, since 2002” By Amanda Etches-Johnson. Began August 2002.

Metrics	2007	2008	2009	C08-09	C07-09
Posts	11	10	1	-90%	-91%
Quintile	4	4	5	5	5
Words per post	257	289	250	-13%	-3%
Quintile	3	3	3	4	3
Comments per post	3.2	6.8	4.0	-41%	26%
Quintile	1	1	1	4	2

When Etches-Johnson posts, she usually has something interesting to say. Lately, she hasn’t posted much (the single post for this quarter is about the lack of posts and an experiment in “lifestreaming”).

Go buy it!

Lots more in the book–PDF or paperback. And free shipping during the summer.

…and too late smart.

The setup

Four times, I’ve done analyses of liblogs (blogs by library people, as opposed to library blogs)–twice within Cites & Insights, twice as books.

Still available, still great bargains: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 and But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009. Note that Lulu’s still offering free shipping for any order over $19.95, making these even better bargains.

If you’re wondering: The two C&I analyses were Investigating the Biblioblogosphere in September 2005 and Looking at Liblogs: The Great Middle in August 2006.

In each case, and particularly for the two books (which attempted to cover a very large portion of the English-language “liblog landscape”), one of the biggest time-sinks in the project was the process of finding new liblogs–ones I hadn’t already included in a previous study.

There are several sources for such blogs, and the sources tend to repeat one another (as you’d expect)–and once you’re dealing with more than a hundred blogs or so, there’s no way I could remember which blogs I’d already looked at. I used a variety of techniques to make the situation somewhat manageable–after all, we’re talking about several thousand listings in the primary sources–but it still took scores or hundreds of hours, particularly when I started looking at blogrolls.

Last year, I concluded that, if I ever did do another similar study, I’d probably give up on blogrolls altogether: Too much work for too few new discoveries.

The occasion

Based on sales to date of the two books, it would be insane to do another study.

On the other hand… well, there were still things I wanted to know about the progress of (English-language) liblogs.

So I decided to start another, somewhat different, project and carry it out if it seemed feasible and didn’t get in the way of more directly-useful projects (such as a non-self-published book I hope to be doing later this summer and early fall).

The new project differs from the last two in two key respects:

• If there’s a book, it’s going to be much shorter–and the obvious way to do that is by leaving out individual blog profiles. Clearly, at least 90% of blog owners aren’t going to pay for a book that includes a profile of their blog, and those profiles are a lot of work (and take up a lot of space).
• The new project has two levels of inclusion, the first of which makes the project particularly interesting to me.

The two levels

• The broad look: As comprehensive a survey as possible of English-language blogs by library people (excluding official blogs) that have any visibility at all on the web in mid-2010. I can’t claim it will be a comprehensive survey of liblogs, because (a) quite a few have disappeared entirely, (b) a few are password-protected and won’t be included, (c) there will certainly be dozens or hundreds of blogs that I won’t encounter. But it will be the broadest look I’ve taken–albeit with less information on each blog:
  Birthdate: When it began (year and month)
  Lifespan: How many months it operated (through May 2010)
  Currency: The most recent post (prior to June 1, 2010)
  Nationality: The country (when obvious)
  Program: The blogging software (when obvious)
  Frequency: The number of posts from March 1, 2010 through May 31, 2010.
• The deep look: A deeper look at a large subset of those blogs, defined as:
  Blogs that have a Google Page Rank of 4 or higher (fairly visible blogs)
  that have at least two posts between March 1, 2010 and May 31, 2010 (active blogs).
  For those blogs, I’m also tracking the same metrics as in last year’s study (when available): Frequency, comments, and total post length–for March-May 2010 and, for blogs new to this year’s study, going back to March-May periods in 2009, 2008 and 2007.

The first part is more ambitious, in that I’m including–potentially–a lot more blogs.

The second part is less ambitious, both because I’m not doing blog profiles (a decision I could only change with up-front sponsorship–it’s a lot of work) and because I’m limiting that level of statistical analysis to blogs that are currently active.

(One difference: I’m not requiring that blogs have started before January 1, 2010. They must have started before June 1, 2010.)

To do this project, I once again need to dive into the directories, at least as a first cut, recognizing that I’d probably pick up some additional blogs from blogrolls…but only if I could take the time.

The breakthrough (the forehead-slap moment)

Last year, I used some teeny-tiny printouts to try to cut down the amount of extraneous checking, but it was still an enormous pain. This year, I was determined to avoid superfluous printouts, even if they only used a page or two of paper.

I had one small bright idea–at each stage (where I’ve finished a pass against a source of blogs), peel off copies of the blog names and excluded blog names to a separate spreadsheet, sort them, and use that spreadsheet in a narrow little column alongside the browser window when I’m looking at a new source. That worked nicely to add new blogs from my own Bloglines list–the process took half a day or less and yielded 43 new blogs (and nine new exclusions).

Well, so, I could do that with the other primary sources (LISWiki, the ODP list of librarian blogs, the LISZen source list, Meredith Farkas’ “Favorite Blogs” list and Davey P’s “HotStuff” list, the Salem Press list)–but that would still be an ordeal.

Or… I could cut-and-paste each of the directories, with HTML included, into a Word document; use global edits to normalize them, sort the blogs…and trim that document by comparing it to my existing list of already-included blogs. Then cut-and-paste the document back to a webpage to make it easy to check new candidates.

Why didn’t I think of this last year or the year before? Maybe because I never thought of Word and HTML in the same space…maybe because I’m getting old.

The results (so far)

This morning–after the usual Friendfeed time and editing for another project–I did the cut-and-paste for these six sources (the Salem Press list required more work than the others, but still not much); within an hour, I had a sorted Word document with–gasp–2,911 candidates.

This afternoon, after lunch and some errands, I trimmed that sorted document by comparing it to the spreadsheet, including special passes for Idiot Sorting (I’m being lazy this time, so there’s lots of blogs in the “A ” and “The ” areas–and some directories normalize those articles away). The process took about two hours, maybe less…and I now have a webpage (private) with 868 liblog candidates.

Which is still a lot of checking to do, but little enough to be feasible. How many of those 868 will I add to the 606 (not including “excluded blogs”) in the current list? I have no idea; I’d guess somewhere between 200 and 400, but I could be wrong.

If this process does turn out to go reasonably smoothly, I might–after taking an appropriate break and working on other stuff such as C&I–even change my mind about blogrolls. After all, they mostly use a consistent format, and I could cumulate a whole bunch of them in a Word/HTML document and… well, we shall see.

No promises

Am I certain there will be a 2010 survey? Not really. I’d say the odds are pretty good, but if paying gigs come up or there are other things that interfere, it could take a long time–and, frankly, I haven’t invested so many hours in it that I couldn’t just abandon it. (Although my track record for abandoning projects doesn’t suggest that this is highly probable.)

And for those of you who say “You idiot, you could have done this much more easily this time and the last two times by…” Well, you may be right. I certainly could have saved a lot of boring and annoying work in 2008 and 2009 if I’d thought of this. There may be an even better way, but this is a good start.

But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 is no longer available at the special earlybird price.

The price is now $35 hardcopy, $25 PDF.

Thanks to those who took advantage of the early-bird pricing (more than a dozen, lessfewer than a score)!

---

PS: If anyone finds it hard to believe that I was able to get out a new issue of C&I so soon after returning from ALA Midwinter…well, the issue was actually complete (and uploaded) on the day I left for Midwinter, January 14; all I did yesterday was modify the C&I website and publicize the issue. And, to be sure, delete Cites ON A Plane 2010, of which more possibly later.

I’d like to call your attention to this post by Jennifer Macaulay on Just Another Day (you may know Macaulay from her previous blog, Life as I Know It).

I would quote excerpts, but it’s a nicely compact post (unlike certain blabbermouths like Walt Crawford, Jennifer Macaulay knows how to write tersely and well), so here’s the whole thing:

I find the topic of library blogs and blogging fascinating. As such, I always look forward to Walt Crawford’s commentaries about the topic. In this vein, I did buy a copy (pdf version) of his latest book, But Still They Blog. I admit that the statistical analysis made my head spin a bit (I get lost whenever quintiles come up), but the book was certainly worth a read for anyone who is interested in the seeming decline in blogging intensity within the library sphere.

After reading But Still They Blog, it is clear that people blog – and stop blogging – for a variety of reasons. People have wildly different ideas about the impact of tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. on blogging – and on the worth of blogging. Ultimately, blogging isn’t dead, but it isn’t the same as it was several years ago. Crawford tells us all this through statistical analysis and through quotes from the blogs that he profiles. It is the story told through these glimpses at the various blogs which is my favorite part of the book (and is often my favorite part of many of his articles in Cites and Insights).

I am, of course, delighted by this review. (I think quintiles are the best way to model certain data, but I admit they can be daunting. Sorry about that.) Thanks, Jennifer!

Reminder

But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 is still on sale for a special early-bird price until the end of ALA Midwinter–that is, about 18 days from now.

And a word about formats: Lulu will handle ePub now, but it’s up to me to do the conversion. If I have indications from, say, three people that they would buy an ePub version (and won’t buy the PDF or print version), that might make it worth the trouble…assuming that freely-available software does the job properly.

This post is about Chapter 12–the last chapter–of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

The Rest of the Liblogs

Here’s the full text of the chapter–except for the profiles!

This is the point in the book at which I should find profound meaning from these metrics. It’s the perfect opportunity for sweeping conclusions—if there were any.

You’ve seen smaller conclusions throughout the chapters. Yes, a fair number of bloggers have stopped (when has that not been true?). Yes, there seem to be a lot fewer new fairly-high-profile liblogs in 2008 than in previous years. Yes, most bloggers are blogging somewhat less (and very slightly longer).

And yes, some of that can probably be traced to FaceBook, Twitter and FriendFeed, along with the usual reasons—fatigue, changes in life and work, balance, boredom.

Underlying all that, however, liblogs still offer a broad, varied landscape of people with interesting and worthwhile things to say. Blogging may be dead (if you believe some pundits)…but still they blog.

The remaining liblogs—those that didn’t turn up in a previous chapter—aren’t “leftovers” by any means. A few of these are among my personal favorites, one or two are among those I choose not to comment on so as to avoid snark, several have gone by the wayside—and many just don’t have quite enough frequency, long enough posts or enough comments to stand out in a metric (or had metrics problems).

Again: metrics only measure quantity, not quality. You need to judge quality for yourself.

The Profiles

In this case (and this case only), the profiles are in alphabetical order, since I couldn’t come up with any better scheme.

• Arnold Digital
• BeanWorks
• Designing Better Libraries
• DigInit
• digitalcommons
• Disruptive Library Technology Jester
• Feel-good Librarian
• Fiddling Librarian 3.0
• Frequently Answered Questions
• Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services
• The History Librarian
• Impromptu Librarian
• informationatrix
• Informationoverlord
• InfoTangle
• The Inspired Library School Student
• The Itinerant Poetry Librarian
• Jason the Content Librarian
• Jennie Law
• Laurie the Librarian
• Letters from the Library
• Librarians Helping Canadian Genealogists Climb Family Trees
• Library Games
• Library Geek Woes
• Library Pariah
• library riot
• Library Tourguide to Technology
• Library Trainer
• LibraryStream
• LibTalk Blog
• Lifelong Access Libraries Blog
• Linux Librarian
• the log of a librarian
• mapz: a gis librarian
• maura and the library
• Metalogue
• misc.joy
• Musings of a Medical Librarian Maven
• myliblog
• The Notebook
• On Libraries & Other Stuff
• Pimp My Library
• quiddle
• Radical Reference
• Readers’ Advisory Knapsack
• Robotic Librarian
• Solvitur ambulando
• A Splash Quite Unnoticed
• Subject/Object
• Talking Books Librarian
• Vancouver Law Librarian Blog
• Wanderings of an online librarian
• the wee librarian
• WoW! Wouter on the Web
• Z666.7.L364 (www.jenniferlang.net)

This post is about Chapter 10 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

Why People Blog–and How Blogs Change

This study includes 521 blogs. What they have in common is that each involves one or more “library people” as defined very loosely—people who have some connection to the library field and write, at least part of the time, about library-related issues.

How do these people blog, and how is that changing? That’s largely what this book is about, on an objective, quantifiable basis. I discuss qualitative areas in Cites & Insights from time to time.

Why do these people blog—and how is that changing? There are many reasons for blogging, some more sensible than others. Here’s my quick take on plausible and implausible reasons for starting and maintaining liblogs, followed by some comments from bloggers themselves.

The chapter begins with some reasons I believe people blog–just a few of the many–and continues with material from the July 2009 Cites & Insights, followed by new material (some of which will probably appear, in different form, in the January 2010 Cites & Insights).

I believe it’s an interesting and worthwhile discussion, which is why it stayed in the book (there’s nothing similar in The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008) even as it became clear that this book was on the long side…

Profiles

The following blogs, mentioned in Chapter 10 and not previously profiled, are profiled in Chapter 10.

• Blisspix.net
• Daveman’s Blog
• Eagle Dawg Blog
• Family Man Librarian
• From the Inside Out
• Ian Snowley’s Library Managment blog

This post is about Chapter 9 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

Ordered your copy yet? I won’t claim it’s a great holiday present (unless you’re stuck for a gift for library people who write blogs), but if you buy it now at the bargain introductory price, you’ll have it in time for Midwinter–just the thing for that long plane flight. (And I’ll be happy to autograph it, as is true with any of my books…)

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

Correlations and Averages

A short chapter, and I can’t claim to have found anything startling. It’s much less graphically interesting than the corresponding chapter in the earlier book, as I chose not to prepare scatterplots (they’re fun to do, but I didn’t find them meaningful in these cases).

Profiles

None–which isn’t surprising, because no individual blogs are named in Chapter 9; it’s all about overall patterns, such as they are.

That’s also why this post is “doubled up” rather than appearing a day after the post on Chapter 8.

Here comes another verse, not quite the same as the other verse…

This post is about Chapter 8 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

Excerpts

There’s one peculiarity for 2008-2009 that wasn’t present in 2007-2008: Half a dozen blogs that went from no posts to some posts—and are included because they also had posts in 2007. Since moving from nothing to something is an infinite increase, these show up as having significantly more and longer posts with significantly more conversational intensity…

If patterns of change across the landscape were completely random, each of the fully-indented rows (combinations of three metrics changes) would have roughly 56 blogs and 1,660 posts and show 13% in each percentage column.

None of the eight patterns is close to those figures.

Three outliers are interesting:

• The most common pattern by far is the “discouraged” pattern: Fewer, shorter posts with less conversation. That pattern represents 125 blogs (28%) but only 11% of the posts.
• The next most common patterns are two with fewer posts and more conversation—77 blogs with longer posts and 71 with shorter posts. Combined, those represent a third of the blogs and 28% of the posts.
• The pattern with fewest blogs is the same as for 2007-2008: More posts, but shorter and less conversational. That has 20 of the blogs (4%) and 564 posts (4%).
• It’s interesting that two-thirds of blogs had (slightly) longer posts—and that a solid majority had more conversation.

The chapter also goes through the “better model” of triplets. You’d need to read it and study the tables to gather much meaning.

Profiles

These liblogs are mentioned in this chapter and hadn’t already been profiled–and by this time, most blogs had already been profiled.

• Aaron the Librarian
• All Things Amy
• Distracted Truffle Pig
• The Uncommon Commons
• The Letter Z
• Going Green @your library
• A LIBRARIAN AT THE KITCHEN TABLE
• Alone in the Archives
• Carolyne’s pages of interest
• A Wandering Eyre
• OA Librarian
• Hectic Pace
• Semantic Library
• Deepening the Conversation
• LIS :: Michael Habib

This post is about Chapter 7 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

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So far, the book looked at one metric at a time (except for chapter 6) but a blog is more than its individual metrics. This chapter and the next look at patterns—patterns of change from one year to the next. Three elements make up the change pattern for a blog:

• Change in number of posts: Were there more posts in 2008 than in 2007, fewer, or about the same number?
• Change in post length: Was the average post in a given blog longer in 2008 than in 2007, shorter, or about the same length?
• Changes in comments per post: Was the blog more conversational in 2008 than in 2007 (that is, did the average post have more comments), less conversational, or about the same?

Table 7.1 offers a simplified view of these three changes—“simplified” because it breaks blogs down into “More” or “Less” (where no change at all is counted as “More”)—and that overstates the significance of small changes.

For those who read last year’s study, note that there’s one significant change this time around, for both the simplified table and the triplets: I’m leaving out blogs that lack length metrics in either of the two years being compared. That’s never more than 10% of the blogs, and it means the tables can be considerably shorter (24 lines rather than 36 in the case of Tables 7.1 and 8.1) and easier to understand. Since every blog with a length metric has a valid comment metric (even if the comment count is zero), that further simplifies the process. Blogs are omitted if they have no posts in 2007 as usual—but not if they have posts and no comments. (Note that a blog with zero posts in both years would be counted as having “more” conversational intensity in the second year—an example of the problems with straight up-down comparisons.)

That’s the start of the chapter. Most of the chapter deals with triplets–blogs that have increased or decreased more than 20%, and those that haven’t changed all that much. It’s a rich measure; I won’t attempt to provide a summary here.

Profiles

These liblogs are mentioned in Chapter 7 and weren’t previously profiled.

• The Running Librarian
• Loomware – Crafting New Libraries
• nirak.net – Musings of an LIS Student
• Into the Stacks
• The Un-Cool Librarian
• Dewey & Main
• Outgoing
• davidrothman.net
• Heretical Librarian
• Annoyed Librarian
• New Jack Librarian
• info NeoGnostic
• Meeting on the ledge
• Twilight Librarian
• School Libraryland
• BiblioTech Web
• library+instruction+technology
• @ the library [2] (“[2]” added to distinguish the second liblog with this name)
• ebyblog
• Senior Friendly Libraries
• Library Snark
• A Passion for ‘Puters
• pamryan.info
• Librarian Idol
• Loriene’s Blog
• Biblioblather
• Misadventures of the Monster Farmer-Librarian
• LACUNY Blog
• yes to know
• Alternative Teen Services
• Canuck Librarian
• clifflandis.net
• Hidden Peanuts
• michael e casey
• Quiescit anima libris
• checking out and checking in
• LibraryTechtonics
• Inquiring Librarian
• DigiCMB
• Right Wing Librarian
• Info Junkie
• Chronicles of the (almost) Bald Technology Trainer
• ONLINE Insider
• Prairie Librarian
• alliance virtual library
• copy this blog
• Library etc.
• REAL PUBLIC LIBRARIAN
• Librarian Ire
• Mary Ellen Bates – Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month
• Blog on the Side – Darlene Fichter
• Cataloging Futures
• Life as I Know It
• Continuing Education!
• The Gay Librarian

Another PS

Hmm. As I was completing the book, I came upon a situation that suggested that my methodology for controlling liblog profiles (deleting them from a master document as I moved them into chapters) failed on one occasion–that I had one more profile than I should. I now know where that happened, in this chapter, and probably won’t correct the trivial error.

Chapter Six is entirely new–a discussion with no parallel in The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Before considering patterns of change (how blogs change across multiple metrics), let’s look at some standouts and standards: Blogs that are within the same quintile either across all three key metrics (frequency, post length and conversational intensity) or across all three years within a given metric, and are also within the top three quintiles for the metrics in which they show consistency.

This chapter is about consistency—falling into the same general population across several metrics. It’s not about quality, and no larger conclusions can be drawn. Think of this as a break in the narrative. You’ll discover early on that no blog is in the first quintile throughout—although two come close, with consistently top rankings in two of the three years.

In case it’s not obvious…

This post is about Chapter 6 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

As I was saying…

Which two? The Blue Skunk Blog in 2007 and 2008; UK Web Focus in 2007 and 2009.

Beyond those, there are surprisingly few blogs that rank in the first quintile (or consistently in the second or third) across the three primary metrics even in a single year–e.g., four in the top quintile in 2007, two in 2008 and five in 2009.

Looking at single metrics across multiple years, it’s not surprising that there are more–e.g., 44 blogs are consistently among the most prolific in all three years, 26 have consistently long posts, and 45 have consistently high conversational intensity.

My overall conclusions for the chapter boil down to a single word with a one-sentence expansion:

Don’t. That is, don’t attempt to draw too many conclusions from these consistency notes—especially since some standout blogs in one or two years couldn’t be measured in other years.

Profiles

Profiles for these blogs–mentioned in this chapter and not previously profiled–appear in Chapter 6:

Not So Distant Future

The Rock & Roll Librarian

infomusings

Zzzoot

snail

The FRBR Blog

It’s all good

Infoblog

Random Musings from the Desert

Tombrarian

Superpatron – Friends of the Library, for the net

T. Scott

Marcus’ World

One Big Library

Library Cloud

LibraryTavern

Chicago Librarian

uncaged librarian

librarytwopointzero

mélange

LibraryLaw Blog

Pop Goes the Library

RSS4Lib

CogSci Librarian

The Bunless Librarian

PS

I believe there have been, through Chapter 6, two cases where–because of their order on some specific metric–two liblog profiles appear in “alphabetic order,” that is, the same order in which they appear in the index. There is no prize for figuring out the two cases…

This post is about Chapter 5 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

This 319-page trade paperback provides a sweeping look at liblogs (blogs created by library people but, generally, not blogs that are official library publications), with trends, facts, figures, graphs, and profiles for each of 521 liblogs. It continues the most comprehensive detailed look at liblogs (or any category of blogs) that I know of, showing measurable characteristics and how they’re changing over the years.

Conversations

Is blogging publication or conversation? Yes and sometimes. Blogging is always a form of publishing—but some posts on some blogs become conversations. The conversational function varies heavily from blog to blog, and newer tools—particularly FriendFeed and FaceBook—may have weakened blog conversations, with the odd result that some extended FriendFeed conversations are based on blog posts and might otherwise take place on the blogs.

Some blogs don’t have comments, either because the blogger doesn’t allow them or because the posts don’t attract comments. And, there are some blogs where I couldn’t determine the number of comments—although there are also blogs where I couldn’t track length but could count comments.

This chapter considers overall comments for each blog during the three-month study periods (March-May 2007, 2008, and 2009)–but also the more interesting metric: conversational intensity or average comments per post. There’s an anomalous change in the highest overall comments (dropping from 1,689 in 2007 and 1,219 in 2008 to 581 in 2009), almost certainly the result of one particular blog moving onto the inscrutable (or at least unmeasurable) LJ/SLJ blog platform–I’d call it “blowing a fuse,” but that would be a cheap joke. In fact, highest conversational intensity went up sharply in 2008 (from 28.9 to 53.0) and stayed up in 2009 (51.0), although the gap between the highest CI and the second highest CI was huge (second highest: 13.8 comments per post, with four others over 10).

The chapter also includes three-year patterns for changes in conversational intensity. It’s hard to draw any overall conclusions, since over the 2007-2009 period, roughly 40% of blogs increased significantly (more than 20%) in conversational intensity while another 40% decreased significantly!

Liblog Profiles

These blogs are profiled in Chapter 5 because they were either among those with the most overall comments in 2009, the highest conversational intensity in 2009 or at least 50% more conversational intensity in 2009 than in 2008–and they hadn’t already been profiled in Chapters 1-4.

• LibraryThing
• Library Lovers’ LiveJournal
• Confessions of a real librarian
• Ruminations
• blyberg.net
• @ the library
• Closed Stacks
• “Self-plagiarism is style”
• Thingology (LibraryThing’s ideas blog)
• Filipino Librarian
• info-mational
• Library Web Chic
• Gargoyles loose in the library
• HeyJude
• librariesinteract.info
• Library Revolution
• The Vampire Librarian
• Dewey’s Dartboard
• librarygrrrl.net
• Collections 2.0
• The Eeyore Librarian
• Miss Information
• Circ and Serve
• Foxylibrarian.com
• Larocque and Roll
• lis.dom
• the goblin in the library
• Chornomore
• Loose Cannon Librarian
• ADHD Librarian
• The Cataloguing Librarian
• California Dreamin’
• Librarians as Knowledge Managers
• InfoMatters
• Gemini Moon
• Library Technology in Texas
• Dynamic Librarian
• Innovate
• Quædam cuiusdam
• Libraries & Life
• Speak Quietly: Ramblings About Libraries, Writing, and Everything in Between
• commonplaces
• PomeRantz
• Spellbound Blog
• Remaining Relevant
• the disorganized librarian
• Panlibus
• Librarian Philosopher
• τεχνοσοφια