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Why People Blog–and How Blogs Change (But Still They Blog, 10)

Posted in Liblogs on December 12th, 2009

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.

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Correlations and Averages (But Still They Blog, 9)

Posted in Liblogs on December 11th, 2009

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.

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Patterns of Change, 2008-2009 (But Still They Blog, 8)

Posted in Liblogs on December 11th, 2009

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.

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Patterns of Change, 2007-2008 (But Still They Blog, 7)

Posted in C&I Books, Liblogs, Writing and blogging on December 10th, 2009

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.

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.

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.

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Standouts and Standards (But Still They Blog, 6)

Posted in C&I Books, Liblogs, Writing and blogging on December 9th, 2009

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…

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    Conversations (But Still They Blog, 5)

    Posted in C&I Books, Liblogs, Writing and blogging on December 8th, 2009

    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.

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    The long and short of blogs (But Still They Blog, 4)

    Posted in Liblogs on December 7th, 2009

    Last year, it seemed reasonable to suppose that, on the whole, liblogs would have fewer posts but longer posts, as Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others replaced many of the uses for very short posts.

    If anything, that’s even more true in 2009, even as a number of bloggers simply stopped blogging. One new liblog is an extreme case: In the Library with the Lead Pipe, a group blog that’s essentially an essay magazine done in blog form, with each (reviewed and edited) entry the length of a typical magazine or journal article.

    While more of the remaining libloggers seem likely to write essays rather than quick posts, there are still blogs for which the single sentence or two is the norm, including link blogs and some others.

    In Case It’s Not Obvious…

    This post is about Chapter 4 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 Long and Short of Blogs

    Chapter 4 begins with metrics on overall blog length and how they’ve changed. The longest blogs seem to get longer every year: While March-May 2007 tops out at 186,467 words, March-May 2008 jumps past the 200K mark (204,517 words) and March-May 2009 finds one blog all the way up to 238,351…noting that it wasn’t feasible to measure total length of some blogs. At the same time, the median length declined each year–from 6,216 words in 2007 to 5,536 in 2008 and 3,621 in 2009.

    More interesting, however, is post length, even if it’s only practical to measure average post length. (It would be interesting to measure length distribution within each blog, but also incredibly time-consuming…) Most of this very long chapter is devoted to discussions and tables relating to average words per post and how post length in blogs has changed over the years–and to the largest set of blog profiles in the book, partly because terse blogs (those averaging less than 100 words per post) are profiled along with the essayists.

    Profiles of Longest Blogs, Essayists and Terse Blogs and Longer Posts

    These blogs have profiles in Chapter 4 because they fall into one of those four categories and weren’t already profiled in Chapters 1-3.

    4 Comments »

    Changes in frequency (But Still They Blog, 3)

    Posted in C&I Books, Liblogs, Writing and blogging on December 6th, 2009

    To nobody’s surprise, this post is about Chapter 3 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.

    Changes in Frequency

    It’s clear from Chapter 2 that, on the whole, visible liblogs had considerably fewer posts in 2009 than in 2007, with fewer liblogs having any posts and fewer posts per blog.

    But blogs don’t all change in the same way. This chapter considers changes in posting frequency on a blog-by-blog basis…

    Quite a few libloggers did significantly more blogging in 2008 than in 2007—all of [the top 20%] and part of [the next 20%] The median blog in Quintile 1 [the top 20%] had 75% more posts. The next year, the median increase was only 50% and, while the entire first quintile included more posts, the change ranged down to barely noticeable (8%). Over the two-year period, the top quintile includes a number of blogs with slightly fewer posts in 2009 than in 2007. Still, as listed later in this chapter, there were dozens of blogs with more posts in each successive year.

    The second quintile, representing blogs with somewhat better year-to-year records than average, almost exactly matches my “relatively unchanged” definition (+20% to -20%) for 2007-2008, but ranges from tiny increases to losing a quarter of posts for 2008-2009—and, for the two-year period, includes blogs dropping four out of ten posts over two years.

    There is, of course, much more in the book itself, including a list of blogs with more posts in 2009 than in 2007 and other ways to view changes in frequency.

    Growth Blog Profiles

    These blogs–one with more posts in 2009 than in 2007 that hadn’t already been profiled–have profiles in Chapter 3.

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    Rivers, streams and rivulets (But Still They Blog 2)

    Posted in C&I Books, Liblogs, Writing and blogging on December 5th, 2009

    I’m not going to do the little pop quizzes I did last year (and started in “Looking at the landscape“). Instead, I’ll introduce this post by saying it’s about Chapter 2 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.

    Chapter 2: Rivers, Streams and Rivulets: Posting Frequency

    Some blogs are rivers of posts—and if you subscribe to several, you may come to think of them as firehoses. Others, including most liblogs, are streams or rivulets: Writers and groups of writers letting you know when they have something to say that works best as a blog post.

    How often do posts appear on a blog?

    Until feeds and aggregators became common, that was an important question. If you didn’t provide a reasonably steady stream of posts, people wouldn’t have reason to come back to your blog or bookmark it. Few posts, few readers. Some people advised trying to do at least one post a day. Others offered less strenuous advice.

    These days, when most readers see posts indirectly, a steady stream of posts is only important for certain kinds of blogs. Indeed, too many posts can work against readership, particularly if posts appear to be for the sake of posting.

    This chapter considers frequency of posts among the 521 liblogs for 2007, 2008 and 2009—and changes in the overall picture. The next chapter considers changes on a blog-by-blog basis, a somewhat different consideration.

    In all, 449 blogs had countable posts in March-May 2007, ranging from one post to 1,161, with a median of 25 posts (roughly two per week). 486 blogs had countable posts in March-May 2008, ranging from one post to 919, with a median of 20 posts. 434 blogs had countable posts in March-May 2009, ranging from one post to 909–with a median of 13, exactly one per week.

    There’s lots more in the chapter, of course.

    Liblogs profiled in Chapter 2

    These are prolific blogs (for 2009) that weren’t already profiled.

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    Looking at the landscape (But Still They Blog 1)

    Posted in Liblogs on December 4th, 2009

    What do ResearchBuzz, The Handheld Librarian, LibraryPlanet.com, The Rabid Librarian’s Ravings in the Wind and wiredfu have in common?

    But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009

    You’ll find this and more in 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.

    Chapter 1: But Still They Blog

    The first chapter considers what might be happening with liblogs, changes in methodology and inclusion since The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 (which is still available), changes in metrics this time around, and a few general comments on the 521 liblogs included this time around:

    • Their age
    • Blogging platform used
    • Currency as of September 30, 2009–that is, the most recent post as of that date.

    Hint: You’ll find the answer starting on page 13.

    Profiles: The Pioneers

    In this book, individual blog profiles generally appear in the chapter where the blog is first mentioned. For Chapter 1, I profile the blogs that have been around for more than five years (that is, blogs beginning in 2003 or before), plus the blog you’re reading now–used as an example of what’s in the profiles. (And this year, most–but not all–liblog profiles include brief subjective comments.)

    Profiles for these blogs appear in Chapter 1:

    2 Comments »

    Liblogger subtypes and countries: There for a price

    Posted in Liblogs on November 30th, 2009

    The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 includes a table showing bloggers by affiliation (22 of them) and another showing non-U.S. bloggers by nation (18). There’s also a table categorizing blog authorship: Full name, partial name, pseudonym, unsigned, or group blog.

    Chapter 9 of that book includes discussions of 12 subcategories with at least 10 blogs (hmm: the chapter says 15, but in fact there are 12 discussions), showing how the subgroups differ from the universe of blogs in the book.

    This time around, for But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, I didn’t categorize blogs and bloggers by authorship, country or affiliation–partly because I didn’t really find the subgroups particularly informative, partly because “affiliation” is a tricky, multifaceted, overlapping thing.

    But if there’s a demand…

    One correspondent has suggested that it would be useful to have subgroup data. And where there’s a need, there’s a way…

    Namely: If you want a comparison of a subgroup of blogs with the universe of blogs in But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, I’d be happy to oblige.

    For a price.

    It takes time to do such comparisons, and I don’t expect that sales of this book will be enormously larger than for the earlier one.

    Here’s the deal…

    If you desire a subgroup comparison against the universe of 521 liblogs in the book:

    • You send me the list of liblogs and the name you want for the subgroup.
    • You send me a phrase from the book that tells me you’ve purchased a copy–I’ll respond to your initial email with a page, paragraph and sentence number.
    • You pay, in advance, a sum for the work I do in preparing the comparison and sending you a PDF (or, if you prefer, a Word .docx file or, without narrative, an Excel .xslx file) of the results, as follows:
    1. $250 for up to 10 blogs that are already in the book.
    2. $20 per additional blog that’s already in the book.
    3. $50 per blog that is not already in the book (that is, $70 per additional blog), since I’ll need to develop the metrics for those blogs.
    • So if you had a group of 15 blogs, 13 of which were already in the universe of 521, the price would be $250 + $60 + $140, or $450 total.

    Not holding my breath

    Do I expect to get lots of takers? No, but it’s a fair price for the work involved.

    Do I expect to get any takers? See the subhead immediately above.

    Re comments: A few of you may have seen a critical comment here–albeit one that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s gone now, not because it was critical but because it was spam, with a link leading to a commercial site.

    I’m not sure why a spammer would go out of their way to be hostile to the blogger they’re trying to spam, but I can see the possibility of claiming “Look! He’s censoring negative comments!” Not so.

    2 Comments »

    But Still They Blog: Now available

    Posted in C&I Books, Liblogs on November 29th, 2009
    But Still They Blog

    But Still They Blog

    But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 is now available–at a special early-bird price through the end of the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting (January 19, 2010 or thereabouts).

    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.

    What’s Here

    The liblogs included here (you’ll find the whole list in the sidebar) appear because:

    • They’re in English.
    • They began in December 2008 or earlier.
    • They have at least some relevance to libraries and librarianship, although that point gets stretched in a few cases.
    • They had at least three posts during March-May 2007, March-May 2008, or March-May 2009.
    • They were available on the web in the summer of 2009 (even if they’d ceased).
    • They were known to me–either because they were listed in the LISWiki list of blogs or the LISZen list of blogs or because they showed up in one of a hundred or so blogrolls that I checked.
    • They were “visible”–in this case, having a Google Page Rank of at least 4 in either early fall 2008 or early summer 2009.

    That final criterion was used deliberately to narrow this study’s focus slightly from the 2007-2008 study (which continues to be available, The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look.). I’d hoped to get down to 400-450 blogs, making analysis easier and the book shorter. I didn’t manage to do quite that well, although the list of 607 blogs from the earlier study did come down to 480 (there are 41 new blogs).

    If you’re wondering: Only 50 liblogs were eliminated because of their low visibility. The others were either non-English [19], defunct (that is, no longer viewable in August 2009 and with no clear trail to a new URL or blogname) [15, plus three that now require passwords], or didn’t have at least three posts in March-May 2007 or March-May 2008 [37]…or, in three cases, really didn’t have any posts that had anything at all to do with libraries.

    What’s Discussed

    I’ll be doing a series of posts and articles over the next few (many?) months noting some of the metrics and offering some of the content, but here’s the gist:

    • The first chapter discusses the age of liblogs, blogging platform used, and currency as of September 30, 2009 (how long it had been since the most recent post).
    • The second and third chapters discuss posting frequency and changes in frequency.
    • Chapter 4 considers the length of blogs–and, more interesting, the average length of posts in blogs (and the changes in both of those metrics).
    • Chapter 5 deals with conversations: Number of comments per blog and per post and changes in conversational intensity (number of comments per post).
    • Chapter 6 considers standouts and standards–blogs that score consistently across multiple metrics or multiple years.
    • Chapters 7 and 8 consider patterns of change across three key metrics (frequency, average post length, average comments per post) for 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 respectively.
    • Chapter 9 considers correlations and averages, including averages for a very large subset of the liblog universe that might be considered “typical.”
    • Chapter 10 considers why people blog and how blogs change.
    • Chapter 11 discusses stopping and pausing.
    • Unlike last year’s study, this book distributes blog profiles throughout the chapters, typically including a profile when the blog shows up as noteworthy in one particular dimension. The final chapter includes profiles for “the rest of the liblogs”–50-odd blogs, some of which are indeed noteworthy for content but don’t happen to stand out in metrics.
    • There’s an index of blogs (with all mentions) and bloggers (only when they’re actually named). The page on which the blog is profiled appears in boldface in the index.

    Special Pricing

    From now until the end of the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting (roughly January 19, 2010), But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 will be available for a special introductory price:

    • The 6×9 trade paperback costs $29.50. (Lulu Media Mail shipping is now a flat $3.99 for all paperbacks, at least in the U.S.)
    • The book is also available as a downloadable PDF for $20.00

    Those prices will go up $5.50 and $5 respectively after Midwinter.

    Reduced Prices on C&I Books

    Prices on all other Cites & Insights Books have also been reduced, effective immediately:

    2 Comments »

    Every liblog is a star?

    Posted in Liblogs on November 19th, 2009

    A few years back, I had a breakfast conversation about possible distributed publicity campaigns for American public libraries. I had the notion that, if properly defined, every library was a star: That every public library does something unusually well, something worth publicizing.

    (No, this actually isn’t a comment on one particular magazine’s “star library” listings. I don’t want to get into that, lacking enough background to comment knowledgeably.)

    When I decided to do a followup to The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008, one of the changes was to avoid having one huge, somewhat indigestible, chapter with all the blog profiles (that’s pages 122-268 of the book–as I say, it’s a huge chapter). Having them all in one alphabetical order is great for quick lookups, but doesn’t really encourage reading the profiles–there are just too many.

    So, for But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009 (on its way soon–I need to choose a cover photo, prepare the cover, upload it and check over a trial copy, but first there’s a little matter of Thanksgiving, where we’ll host twice as many people as ever before), I decided to distribute the profiles:

    Several chapters include lists of blogs that are noteworthy in one dimension or another. For most of those lists, if the blog hasn’t already been profiled, the profile appears at the end of that chapter.

    So, for example, chapter one ends with 87 profiles, chapter two 56, chapter three 41, chapter four 105…

    Did every blog wind up profiled in one of the main chapters? Not quite. Some liblogs, including a few that I consider particularly important, just didn’t stand out in terms of quantifiable metrics–which aren’t, to be sure, the most important things about blogs.

    But most did. The final chapter includes the rest of the profiles, and it only has 55 profiles out of 521 liblogs in the book: 10.6% of the total. Even using a relatively small set of metrics, 89.4% of blogs had some noteworthy (positive) characteristic. If I’d included lists of standouts for 2007 or 2008, which I generally didn’t, I’m sure I would have picked up even more. (Quick inspection says that’s definitely true for 22 of the 55.)

    As for libraries? I still think it’s an interesting idea, but not one I’m in any position to pursue.

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    And sometimes it isn’t…

    Posted in Liblogs, Writing and blogging on November 11th, 2009

    A couple of weeks ago I posted “Sometimes it’s just a waste” about preparing a “trimmed” set of liblogs, running some metrics, and finding the results so uninteresting that I discarded the partial chapter.

    I got a couple of comments on the post, one of which eventually resulted in rethinking the effort.

    Most of the new study, But Still They Blog, avoids averages as being meaningless in a universe as heterogeneous as liblogs. But there may be cases where averages are still at least mildly interesting–particularly if the universe is made a little more homogeneous.

    Here’s what I did:

    • First, prepared a table of averages and supporting figures for all of the blogs in the study, for the cases where averages might have some use. That table fits on a single book page with room to spare.
    • Second, removed all blogs that don’t have length metrics for all three years (either because there were no posts or because I couldn’t measure length).
    • Third, removed eight blogs that seem atypical–most of them some form of current awareness service, one a pure link-and-headline blog committed to one very brief post per day. That’s eight of the 325 blogs that have length metrics for all three years–not many, but they make a difference.
    • Then prepared a table with the same averages and totals (a shorter table, since the first one had to account for blogs with no length metrics).
    • Noted the differences–to wit, a more distinct dropoff in posts from 2008 to 2009, and a more distinct, if still small, increase in average post length–and provided two more figures: The number of blogs each year with “essay length” posts, using two definitions of “essay length.” Using either definition, the number of essay-length blogs has grown substantially over the years.

    It’s not a big deal–it adds four pages to what will still be the shortest chapter in the book–but it’s mildly interesting. And, given the nature of the spreadsheet, it probably took longer to describe trimming the universe than to actually do it…

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    Sometimes it’s just a waste

    Posted in Cites & Insights, Liblogs on October 30th, 2009

    Another pebble on the road to But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009…

    Status

    On October 14, I said I was pausing for breath–stepping back from the project, after finishing the first draft of the first five chapters, to write some essays for the next Cites & Insights and to take a fresh look at what the statistics say about the state of liblogs, at least for the portion written so far.

    I wrote an essay–and since it’s more than 22,000 words long and there’s the second half of 50 Movie Comedy Classics to report on, that’s probably it for the December 2009 issue. (Probably out next week. Possibly a little later.)

    I also reviewed the chapters, came up with a small number of additional insights, and edited them to 2nd draft status.

    And, since then, I’ve prepared chapters 6-9:

    • Chapter 6: Standouts and standards–blogs showing the most consistency in key metrics either across metrics or across years.
    • Chapter 7: Patterns of change, 2007-2008.
    • Chapter 8: Patterns of change, 2008-2009.
    • Chapter 9: Correlations (which turns out to be very short and not terribly interesting).

    Shortly, I’ll print out chapters 6-8 to review for better ways to describe what I found–much as I did for chapters 1-5.

    But then there’s this, from the October 14 post:

    Maybe it would make sense to look at a subset of the 521 blogs that might be called the “common blogs”–ones that have a significant number of posts in all three years, ones that have full metrics for all three years, ones that aren’t current awareness services in blog form–and see whether those blogs, possibly 200-300, show more distinct patterns than the overall set.

    Common blogs or the core set

    The more I thought about it, the more I thought his would be a neat idea–and added Chapter 10, Core blogs, to the outline.

    And prepared a trimmed copy of the spreadsheet, as follows:

    • Deleted blogs that didn’t have at least 3 posts in March-May 2007, March-May 2008 and March-May 2009.
    • Deleted blogs that lacked length metrics (ones where it wasn’t feasible to determine the total length of posts).
    • Deleted “a handful” (maybe 5?) of extremely prolific blogs that seem to function more as current awareness services than as ordinary blogs, and one blog that consists entirely of links.

    That left me with 265 blogs. So I began Chapter 10, then started preparing quintiles and other analyses to see whether I’d find anything particularly interesting.

    See the title of this post?

    Oh, there will be a Chapter 10–but it will be one of two primarily narrative chapters about why people blog, how blogging changes and why/how blogs disappear. The Chapter 10 that I was working on doesn’t exist any longer, although one paragraph (much shorter than this post!) does appear, as part of Chapter 1.

    Sure, there were changes in the patterns–but they were all changes that were essentially mandated by the way I trimmed blogs. There was nothing “interesting” at all.

    Oh well, only a couple afternoons’ work; in the past, I’ve spent much longer periods on projects that I abandoned or found useless… (Up to and including the very first book-length manuscript I ever wrote, the only one I ever wrote on an electric typewriter, the research for which gave me a lasting hatred of microfilm readers…that was probably close to 1,000 hours of work, and I don’t even have the ms. to show for it.)

    Come to think of it, this post isn’t very interesting either. Such is life. It’s Friday, and there’s a skeleton on our front porch with some creepy little spiders on it…

    A couple of weeks later: Not so quick, bucko. Note the comments on this post, which I started thinking about. To wit, maybe averages could be slightly meaningful for “ordinary” liblogs–that is, stripping out those that are current awareness services, sponsored, etc.

    So I redid a trimmed set, not including the “significant number of posts” but requiring full metrics and removing a very small number of blogs that seemed to be special cases. And, instead of quintiles, I looked at changes in totals and averages from year to year…and came up with some mildly interesting data, which will be added to the Correlations chapter.

    Thanks, John: But for your comment(s), I wouldn’t have thought about this a second time.

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