Walt at Random

My previous post and some accompanying email have resulted in a fair number of messages, mostly direct, a few indirect, for which I’m grateful.

One fairly immediate issue has to do with whether I’ll be at ALA in Washington. This concerns budget, but also a promised speech during the conference (which would, apparently, be my 2010 speech–I seem to be back to one per year). That relates, somewhat indirectly, to a longer-term question having to do with the status of Cites & Insights (and, I suppose, this blog).

Namely…the question of whether my work is meaningful (and appreciated) enough to continue, or whether I should abandon it and spend time entirely on other things, maybe more local. Part of going to ALA or other conferences is keeping in touch; the question is whether that’s worthwhile.

A dear friend asked whether I really thought my work was appreciated. I responded, well, yes, I seem to have pretty good readership and a few people tell me so now and then. (Heck, more than 45,000 pageviews and downloads for one notorious issue so far…not bad for a nonentity in the field.)

Then this dear friend nudged me a little bit: “So, are they buying your books or donating to help keep Cites & Insights going? Does so-called appreciation really mean anything?”

Um.

Well, four people so far have donated to keep C&I going.

As to book sales to individuals…perhaps the less said the better. (I don’t really know who does, or rather doesn’t, buy the books. If you exclude library-held copies as reported in Worldcat.org, that leaves an even dozen sales of But Still They Blog, 50 for The Liblog Landscape, 28 for Academic Library Blogs, 52 for Public Library Blogs, and 214 for Balanced Libraries…and, well, no more than seven for the various paperback annuals of C&I. I think all those numbers are too high–I’d guess other library purchases not [yet] accounted for in Worldcat.org play a significant role.)

So far, I don’t really have a convincing answer for my dear friend. Or one that convinces me that “keeping a hand in” justifies the cost of ALA. The upsurge in donations and sales since that last post amounts to zero, but these are still early days…and, yes, I know, you all have your own financial issues.

The dear friend is suggesting that maybe it’s time for me to wholly retire from the library field. Is the dear friend right?

Followup…: I’ve been informed, just a few minutes ago, of clear evidence that the dear friend is wrong, and I am grateful for that evidence. It looks much more likely that I will be going to ALA Annual, at least this year…and keeping on with C&I while we see what future possibilities arise. Oh, and may I just say “LSW FTW”?

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On an only slightly related note, my apologies to a few people whose comments, on posts that were mirrored from another blog, have been deleted along with those mirrored posts. It no longer makes sense to have the mirrored posts in this blog; the comments make no sense without the attached posts.

For those who care about the issue of Google Analytics metrics vs. Urchin (5) metrics–which is either “quite a few people” (if you believe Urchin) or “pretty much nobody” (if you believe Google Analytics), here’s an update:

• It was pointed out to me that GA won’t track if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled and Javascript enabled. Nothing I can do about that.
• Seth Finkelstein thought it might have to do with HTML errors, and noted that the W3C Validator found a bunch of those on the Walt at Random home page.

So I thought I’d see how tough it was to correct those errors–and whether it made a difference. (I also thought I’d see whether the errors were mine or were in the templates & addons I used.)

There were a bunch of errors, but that includes cascading errors (where one apparent error is really the result of another error–boy, do I remember those from programming, especially in PL/I!). It turns out that about 80% of the “errors” were mine, mostly because I’m used to HTML parsing being fairly forgiving–namely:

• Using all-caps operators where HTML requires all-lower-case.
• Using <br> as a standalone, rather than <br />–but that was both in my own code and in a portion of the template.

I managed to fix them all, although in one case that made the right sidebar a bit less attractive (Validator just wouldn’t accept one particular nested-list). Took me 2, maybe 2.5 hours. Except for the added infelicity in the right margin, it made no difference to the average viewer, I believe, since the visible results were the same. But, presumably, it would make Google Analytic results a little more plausible. Maybe?

Depends on your definition of “a little.”

The changes have been in place since February 23. I’ve had a chance to look at two full days running on a clean, zero-errors home page vs. the same days on Urchin.

There may have been a little increase in pageviews and visits logged by Google Analytics–but not much of one. Here’s what I see for comparisons on the 22, 23 and 24:

• Sessions: February 22: Google Analytics 58, Urchin 1,492.
  February 23: Google Analytics 79, Urchin 1,439
  February 24: Google Analytics 81, Urchin 1,398.
• Pageviews: February 22: Google Analytics 77, Urchin 4,455
  February 23: Google Analytics 115, Urchin 3,213
  February 24: Google Analytics 132, Urchin 3,093.

And, mysteriously, the second-highest post in a full page reports on Google Analytics is a post from the very first year of the blog (on mondegreens), with 34 views…where that post is not even in the top 50 on Urchin.

Possibilities

I do note that none of the GA reported pages is a /feed/index page, where quite a few of the higher ones in Urchin are (these presumably being RSS views of pages?). That could account for some of it–since the GA code is, as recommended, right before </body> in the page, it’s part of the footer, which doesn’t get fed to RSS. Since I regard readers-via-RSS as fully equivalent to readers-”in person,” I’m not thrilled about losing those counts.

But if I filter the Urchin pages report to eliminate everything with “feed” anywhere in it, that eliminates less than one-third of the views, still leaving them way more than 10x as high as GA shows.

I’m not sure what else might be going on. I flat-out don’t believe that 90% of Walt at Random viewers have either cookies or Javascript disabled. (But I could be wrong.)

Resolution

For me, for now, for my own sites, the solution is simple: I’ll take the Google Analytics tracking code out of the template and rely on Urchin for my statistics, since it’s actually (presumably) looking at logs. The GA code is extra overhead for the internet; why waste it?

For my work? They’re looking into it. (There, I think the “plausible to reported” multiple is nowhere near as high…)

How much (and how) is each of us involved with social networks and social media?

You can get glib answers from a number of sources–answers that I always find a little suspicious in their specificity and broadness. But those answers are only for some large group as a whole–and, increasingly, I think it’s clear that “large group” is both a virtue and a problem for social networks.

Yes, I think Metcalfe’s Law is fundamentally wrong–and always have. For social networks in particular, there’s strong evidence that there’s a crossover point at which more linkages cease to add value and start to dissipate value and relevance. That’s a much more complicated issue, one that others are looking at, and certainly way too complicated for an ‘umble post.

There is one thing I’m reasonably certain of: If there’s a crossover point, it varies by network and by person. How could it be otherwise? What I might consider a maddening flood of chatter might, for you, be a pleasantly active set of conversations. What I might consider a reasonable flow of activity might seem to you like nobody’s quite bothered to turn out the lights (but the tumbleweeds are rolling across the stage).

Avoiding the Big Picture

So any generalized statements I might make would be even more suspect than usual. Heck, I don’t even think everyone else should be like me–I certainly don’t believe other people are like me.

And yet… I’ve found it interesting and, in some cases, worthwhile to see how others handle their virtual lives and how that correlates to what I understand of their personas. So maybe one or two of you will find this breakdown useful.

Incidentally, I’m talking about both social media and social networks. Here’s the distinction as I see it:

• A social medium is a publishing medium that encourages direct feedback and interaction–but that typically involves some significant multiple of readers to those providing feedback. I’d put blogs and wikis in this category. (Realistically, lists also belong here. I think Google Reader and Bloglines also do, but aggregators are tricky…)
• A social network is a conversational medium–one that is fundamentally about interaction, not about messages as such. I’d put Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn and others in this category. Ditto Buzz, if Buzz becomes anything other than a botched experiment in opt-out implementation.
• Yes, you can use a social network as a social medium (I’d say that’s the case for any Twitterer with more than 10 times as many followers as follows, or any FriendFeed participant who just feeds in stuff from other sources and never participates in threads.) You can use social media as social networks, sort of, but with considerably more difficulty. (Some wikis might be crude social networks, but not most.)

And that’s way too much overhead for a simple exercise (that could yet turn into a piece of a C&I essay, a ways down the road…) (Oh, and speaking of Cites & Insights: It’s neither. It’s an online publication, impure and complex–impure because in its PDF form it’s really a print publication distributed via the web, which is what I’ve said since its founding.)

So here’s where I think I am, today–noting that I’m a fairly extreme introvert, but that I also write a lot.

Where I Am Right Now (I Think)

Here’s where I believe I am with regard to social media and social networks as of today–including what I believe to be the typical time I spend on each, and how I feel about it.

Social Media

• Walt at Random: My primary social-media outlet. I’ve been here just under five years (really? sometimes it seems less; sometimes much more). My long-term goal has been “roughly two posts a week,” but that was before the automatic post-a-week from my day job. This appears to be post #1,226, so I’m actually averaging just under five posts a week. I’ve had 3,144 comments so far (plus more than 34,500 spam attempts!), which is just about 2.5 comments per post: Terrible for a Name Blogger, not terrible for a liblog. Of course, if I turned off Spam Karma 2 (and extended the time limit for comments, or turned that off as well, and maybe even accepted linkbacks), I’d have more than two dozen comments per post, but the comment facility would also be useless since it would be almost all crap. Let’s see: the blog has a Google Page Rank of five, which is neither strong nor weak. Checking Technorati, I see an Authority of 495 (wow: that’s a lot higher than I expected–but I no longer have much sense of what Technorati Authority actually means); Popurious says I have an Alexa rank of around 2.26 million and some 30,000 Yahoo BackLinks. Of course, it also says I have zero Bloglines subscribers, where Bloglines shows either 104 or 479 (two different feeds). Feedburner (which I’ve learned never to check on the weekend, as numbers seem to dive, then return) shows 827 subscribers, which is astonishing from my perspective. As to measured traffic–well, it depends on who you believe. I added Google Analytics code to track pages (because that’s what’s used for the new Drupal Library Leadership Network, and I’m a little surprised by the low numbers)–and, after a couple of days, I seem to be showing maybe 100 visits and 130 pageviews per day. But Urchin, which actually analyzes server logs (I believe), shows an average of 1,700 visits and just under 5,000 pageviews a day for the past week. So is the site rarely visited at all, or does it have fairly robust numbers? Obviously, I’d like to believe Urchin…and I really do wonder what’s going on with GA. (Maybe I added the code incorrectly?) All in all, I’d call it moderately successful (decent posting frequency, decent level of conversation, more than adequate readership), but then it’s really secondary to C&I, my primary publishing outlet. How much time to I spend on it? This post will take more than an hour to write (it actually took almost exactly two hours); I’d guess I average 15-30 minutes a day on the whole.
• C&I Updates is my oldest blog, but has only one purpose, described in its name. (It’s not actually oldest by much: The oldest post appears to be from August 12, 2004.) 99 posts to date, just a little more than one post per month. No comments. 295 Bloglines subscribers, so I’m guessing maybe 400+ overall? No GPR. I probably spend two minutes per month on this one, since I create the issue announcements in Walt at Random, then copy-and-paste the HTML into C&I Updates. For its very specific purpose, it works just fine…but it’s sure not very social.
• Oh, there’s a “blog” in LISNews too, but that’s almost entirely a mirror of C&I Updates. And LLN Highlights is my “work blog,” just as–until today, when I finished moving the last article to the Drupal LLN–the MediaWiki LLN was my “work wiki.”
• What else? I’ve contributed (rarely) to Library Success Wiki. I’ve contributed (even more rarely!) to Wikipedia. I’m on some unknown but small number of lists–PubLib, Web4Lib, LITA-L, JESSE, and probably a couple of others. Other than issue announcements on the first two, I’m mostly a lurker on these.
• As for aggregators, I’m still using Bloglines and now find that I have even less desire to turn over more of my virtual life to Google tools. As of today, I see 510 feeds in all, of which roughly 470 are library-related. I probably spend 30 to 45 minutes a day going through the aggregator and reading posts as needed, also tagging some in delicious. (My use of delicious doesn’t qualify as social use.) Part of that time is work time. So I read a lot of blogs and comment whenever I think it’s appropriate–I’d guess maybe 2-4 comments a week?

I think that’s it for social media. By and large, I’m OK with the time involved, and I know I get a lot out of the blogs I read. I’d like to think this blog contributes something; I’m certain C&I does.

Social Networks

Here, things get more confusing. Here’s what I believe to be the case–but, just as I’m a permanent ghost in Second Life (you can’t actually delete your account) and probably have a ghost account in Orkut and Ning, I may be a ghost in several other venues…and some people would consider my presence in one other network essentially ghostly.

I’ve almost always used my full name (as one word) for all social networks, and I’ll probably keep it that way.

• Twitter: I’m not there now. I was once upon a time, but it didn’t work, for me, for then. I might be back: Anyone who says “Walt Crawford thinks Twitter is useless” has a reading comprehension problem.
• LinkedIn: I’m there–sort of. Says here I have 140 connections and one recommendation. I’ve treated it as a passive involvement–if people ask me to join their network and I have some vague idea of who they are, I’ll usually accept. LinkedIn didn’t work at all for me when I was looking for a new job, but I wasn’t using it properly (I guess). Best guess: I spend five minutes a week on LinkedIn matters, and that may be too high.
• FaceBook: Sure, I’m there. “Isn’t everybody?” is still grossly off the mark, but the behemoth of social networks is about as universal as they get. I probably check FaceBook twice a day, but I rarely have anything to say–my current status is from February 5. “Checking FaceBook” is tricky, because I’ve also been reasonably passive here–that is, if anyone asks me to friend them and I’m vaguely aware of who they are (or they’re a library person), I’ll probably confirm the request. That means I have 215 “friends”–and that’s just nonsense. Since I don’t spend more than about 10 minutes on FaceBook at a time, I just glance at the first page of Home, then check two “Friends” lists (you know, the actual friends among your friends): one family list (currently eight people) and one “libclose” list (currently 19 people). Those lists, I actually check. Oh, I’m apparently also one of 7,842 members of ALA Members and 10.747 members of Library 2.0 Interest Group: I never check those at all. I never, ever, ever respond to games, suggestions, applications…that “let us bug all your contacts” message always stops me cold. I’m pretty sure my FaceBook network is too big for me to handle, possibly because it’s symmetrical.
• FriendFeed: I spend way too much time here–probably 15 minutes in the morning, but probably over an hour in total during the day–but I also find this one valuable and workable. Let’s see: I currently subscribe to 101 folks, and 157 people subscribe to me. I’m in three groups: LSW (427 people), Librariology (?) (268 people) and LITA & Bigwig (121 people). I’ve made 2,599 comments; I feed in titles of blog posts but nothing else (as far as I know); I offer direct comments once in a while (usually to deafening silence), but mostly take part in existing conversations. I like FriendFeed a lot, but I can’t have it “unpaused” and I can’t have it running if I’m trying to write, to think clearly, to read…but that’s true of any online medium. (Yes, I always run FriendFeed paused: it’s easy to hit Home if I want to refresh it. The “running” version just makes me crazy.) So “I spend way too much time here” has to be balanced against “I find this one valuable and workable”–which I do. It would take a lot to get me to leave FF; it’s a source of valuable pointers, even more valuable ideas, some inspiration and some virtual friendships.
• Meebo: I probably still have an account in the LSW room, but haven’t actually been there in a long time. When it’s active, it’s just too real-time for my asynchronous/introverted nature… (Another way of saying: I realized I was spending as much as an hour at a time there, and that I was getting less done elsewhere. Maybe making the wrong choices, I had to let Meebo go.)
• ALA Connect: I joined early on (I think). It seems like a great idea. In practice, I might touch base here once or twice a month. I’m not sure what the problem is, and I’m willing to believe I’m using it wrong.

I think that’s it…and even looking at that short list (explained in an absurd 2,000 words), I’m getting tired. (If I’ve left things out, maybe someone will remind me…)

For me, that’s just about as much virtual interaction as I can deal with. But that’s me. It’s partly my lack of multitasking competence (I really can’t write well or read deeply with social stuff going on). It’s partly that I really sort of like being truly offline most of the time.

Note again that I’m not offering advice. This is just my own snapshot–partly because others might find it amusing, partly so I can check back in a few months or years and see what’s changed.

Some libloggers (and others, no doubt) have been posting their ten most popular posts for 2009.

Well, why not?

As it turns out, there’s a good reason why not: This blog has had several homes over the past year–not only the brief move to Scienceblogs, but a move to a different machine within the LISHost galaxy because of an odd situation.

As a result, Urchin (LISHost’s stats package, now owned by Google) only shows me data for 2009 in two clumps: January 1 through mid-March, and mid-November through the end of the year (and continuing).

So I’ll give you the recent Top 10–ignoring Feeds and other pages other than direct views of posts.

Top Direct-View Posts, November-December 2009

• On Learning: A Reprint (November 23, 2009)
• The long and short of blogs (But Still They Blog, 4) (December 7, 2009)
• LITA at Midwinter 2010: A Publicity Update (December 15, 2009)
• Technology signposts (November 27, 2009)
• Cites & Insights: Opinions Desired (December 4, 2009)
• Slapstick Festival (November 12, 2009)
• Cites & Insights 9 now available as trade paperback (November 17, 2009)
• Confidentiality, policy and more at the new LLN. (December 14, 2009)
• But Still They Blog: Now available (November 29, 2009)
• Cites & Insights 2010: A Third Option? (December 6, 2009)

I’m not sure what to make of that list. So I won’t make any thing of it at all. Maybe next year I’ll have a full year’s worth of data. Maybe not.

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)

Like Chapter 10, Chapter 11 is entirely new to But Still They Blog.

Why does a blogger pause (which I’ll define as not blogging for at least four months) or stop altogether? I’m certain the most common reason is premature blogging, that is, starting a blog before you really know whether you have much to say. I suspect other reasons are all over the map, with the second largest probably running out of steam or losing interest (or, these days, finding that saying what you have to say is easier and faster on Twitter, FaceBook or FriendFeed).

A fair number of libloggers stopped between mid-2007 and mid-2008, or at least paused for so long that they don’t have any posts—at least 13% of those with enough impact to make it into But Still They Blog and probably more than that among the broader liblog population. Some returned; many didn’t.

What follows is a sampling of posts on why people have stopped or paused blogging—or, in some cases, the fateful final posts that don’t appear intended to be final. Included are some “haven’t been blogging much lately” posts.

In Case It’s Not Obvious…

This post is about Chapter 11 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.

After the introductory section above, this chapter consists of quotes from blogs and comments on those quotes. Portions, in somewhat different form, may appear in the January 2010 Cites & Insights.

Profiled Blogs

The chapter includes profiles for these liblogs, mentioned in Chapter 11 and not previously profiled.

• See Also…
• explodedlibrary bunker
• Bigenarian Librarian
• The Brewin’ Librarian
• Wireless Libraries
• Virtual librariesinteract.info
• Shelved in the W’s
• Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book
• SD Librarian
• digital.brarian
• omg tuna is kewl
• 101 Tips for School Librarians
• Game On: Games in Libraries
• LibraryChange
• Library 2.0: An Academic’s Perspective
• Library Talk
• Library Zen
• Second Life Research Journal
• booktruck.org
• washtublibrarian
• Travels with the State Librarian
• Texadata
• Slow Library
• Christopher Kupec’s Weblog
• The Horseless Library
• Data Obsessed
• InfoPill

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.

---

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

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.

• always learning
• Museum 2.0
• In the Library with the Lead Pipe
• Info Career Trends
• The Gypsy Librarian
• LibraryTechNZ
• Pop Culture Librarian
• The Krafty Librarian
• Librarian In Black
• The Itinerant Librarian
• Rambling Librarian :: Incidental Thoughts of a Singapore Liblogarian
• Librarilly Blonde
• Nodalities blog
• Swiss Army Librarian
• Emerging Technologies Librarian
• info-fetishist
• Librarians Matter
• Baby Boomer Librarian
• Library Alchemy
• InfoSciPhi
• Academic Librarian
• The Zenformation Professional
• ©ollectanea
• Librarian on the edge
• habitually probing generalist
• rachelvacek.com
• Weibel Lines
• Guardienne of the Tomes
• The Cool Librarian
• Coyle’s InFormation
• Tinfoil + Raccoon
• Au Courant
• meg kribble
• Commentary from Carl Grant
• Information Wants To Be Free
• The Ubiquitous Librarian
• The Other Librarian
• Joeyanne Libraryanne
• Everybody’s Libraries
• Obnoxious Librarian from Hades
• Connecting Librarian
• Silversprite
• Epist
• Open Libraries
• Metalogger
• librarygarden
• shimenawa
• Inherent Vice
• Librarian 2
• Manage This!
• Coffee|Code
• Enquiring Minds Want to Know
• 025.431: The Dewey blog
• QQ*librarian
• MemberBlog
• Musings from Vermont
• Connie Crosby
• The Singing Librarian Talks (or Writes…)
• Gather No Dust
• library webhead
• Your Neighborhood Librarian
• The Medium is the Message
• EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC
• eFoundations
• Llyfrgellydd
• Library Angst
• David’s Random Stuff
• userslib.com
• Angels have the phone box
• BentleyBlog
• schenizzle
• Stephen Gallant Review
• The Vital Library
• Feral Library Tales
• digitizationblog
• Practical Katie
• It’s not easy being a George
• Library Computer Guy’s Weblog
• drupalib
• HappyGeek’s CodeX
• AbsTracked
• Libraries in the NHS
• The Invisible Web Weblog
• Darth Libris
• SPLAT
• New Jersey Academic Librarian
• Social Justice Librarian
• Information Research – ideas and debate
• infodoodads
• Nowhere North
• Libraries Build Communities
• Youth Services Corner
• Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli
• LITA Blog
• Simon Chamberlain’s library weblog
• Card Catalog of Creativity
• The Life of Books
• Chez Shoes
• ALA Marginalia
• The Liminal Librarian
• Librarian by Day
• ∆igital Serendipities
• the New Cybrary
• in forming thoughts
• geeky artist librarian

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.

• ishush
• 2CoolTools
• pafa.net
• Thoughts from a Library Administrator
• Library Grants
• The Search Principle blog
• I, Reader
• Creating the One-shot Library Workshop
• LibCasting
• Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia
• Librarians for Human Rights
• Information Literacy meets Web 2.0
• Tennant: Digital Libraries
• Library spring
• A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette
• ALA TechSource Blog
• libraryassessment.info
• ellie <3 libraries
• The PlanetEsme Plan
• Plinius
• hangingtogether.org
• Love the Liberry
• archivematica
• Dilettante’s Ball
• Be openly accessible or be obscure
• A Library Writer’s Blog
• rambleonsylvie
• Cheeky Librarian
• reeling and writhing
• Librarian of Fortune
• The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
• Library Voice
• The Leary Letter
• Digital Eccentric
• Extensible Librarian
• Terry’s Worklog
• BlogJunction
• ArchivesNext
• RUSA Blog
• The Sheck Spot
• Please Be Quiet

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.

• Law Librarian Blog
• DigitalKoans
• Slaw
• The Kept-Up Academic Librarian
• Stephen’s Lighthouse
• The Centered Librarian
• A Fuse #8 Production
• Free Government Information (FGI)
• bookshelves of doom
• Out of the Jungle
• A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
• Bluestalking
• Library Boy
• iLibrarian
• What I Learned Today…
• Head Tale
• poesy galore
• Information Literacy Weblog
• Tame the Web
• ACRL Insider
• Bad Librarianship Now!
• The Good Library Blog
• Libology Blog
• Typo of the day for librarians
• Crazy Quilts
• Digitization 101
• Information Junk
• The Blue Skunk Blog
• Science Library Pad
• Government Info Pro
• ricklibrarian
• OUseful.Info, the blog…
• PLA Blog
• The Distant Librarian
• School Librarian in Action
• Bibliographic Wilderness
• LibraryBytes
• walking paper
• NeverEndingSearch
• Library Juice
• Killin’ time being lazy
• Pegasus Librarian
• Library Blog Buzz
• OPL Plus (not just for OPLs anymore)
• the.effing.librarian
• Library clips
• The “M” Word – Marketing Libraries
• UK Web Focus
• The Mlxperience
• lauren’s library blog
• Shelf Check
• ACRLog
• Christina’s LIS Rant
• Open Sesame
• Paul Miller
• Tom Roper’s Weblog