Walt at Random

Thanks to those who have sent in responses to this post. I’ll continue accepting comments or email (to waltcrawford at gmail dot com) through September 15, 2010.

One clarification:

Blogs don’t have to be “living.”

When I say there has to have been at least one post before June 1, 2010, I don’t mean there have to be any posts during 2010. If a dead liblog is still visible–that is, if its URL still works and leads me to posts–it’s good as a candidate. It would fall into “group 4″ of the study: Liblogs that appear to be either dead or deeply moribund, having had no new posts since May 31, 2009.

I hope this won’t result in hundreds of additional candidates, but if it does, so be it.

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

It’s Your Turn

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

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

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

What’s a liblog?

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

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

Please, Before Submitting Any Candidates…

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

If You Have Candidates…

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

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

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

Postscript, September 16, 2010:

I’ve turned off comments, since it’s now past September 15, 2010.

Between comments here and direct email, and excluding blogs that obviously didn’t fit my criteria, I received 33 candidates. Of those, 25 met the criteria and have been added to the study, bringing the new total to 1,296 liblogs (that includes one more blog, noted in a response to another post, that had one single post some years back…). Six of the candidates are too new, having begun in June, July or August 2010. One is an official blog. And one just doesn’t seem to be there.

Thanks!

Once again, it’s a good thing: Few posts because energy spent on other things. To wit:

The first draft of The Project–that is, “Open Access: What You Need to Know,” an ALA Editions Special Report that will appear in 2011–is complete, and starting today/tomorrow I’ll do the Big Changes: Integrating a fair amount of new material (some of it from “a dozen or so” delicious entries that turn out to be, oog, 88 of them), refining organization, clarifying, aiming toward a second draft that’s probably publishable. That won’t be what I submit to the publisher, but the third (and final) draft should be mostly refinement. (Given that blog posts are “not quite first drafts” and most C&I essays are roughly 1.5th drafts, doing three drafts is unusual for me.)

The Other Project–current working title “The Way We Blog: English-Language Liblogs 2007-2010″–gets a little attention when I’m not working on the book, and got a lot during a few days while letting the first draft sit (complete) before revisiting it. Now up to 1,250 liblogs and another 1,262 excluded candidates. A few (anywhere from 5 to 20) more hours of data gathering to do, before setting it aside until it’s time to start the analysis and writing, probably after C&I resumes and the book is complete.

A couple of changes at home (OK, finally getting an HDTV after discussing it for 2-3 years) have taken up quite a bit of time, and that’s not quite done.

I’m learning a lot along the way in The Other Project, as I expanded it from “liblogs that show up in one of the typical places” to “liblogs the existence of which I can discover.” For example:

• There’s a large and extremely vigorous group of liblogs almost none of which show up in the typical places (they have their own typical places), namely kidlit and tween/teen/YA lit blogs (I’m only including ones clearly by library people–not all the others). I mean extremely vigorous. I wonder when some of these people sleep…
• I’d already apologized for an intemperate post a couple of years ago about what program is used by most libloggers. Turns out, I suspect, that the only answer is the usual one: “It depends.” For example, Blogger seems pretty clearly to be the platform of choice for many or most of these book review blogs, even while WordPress is pretty clearly the platform of choice for experienced tech, etc., liblogs. But that’s preliminary.
• A few blog templates (or individual choices) seem to go out of their way to discourage reading more than either the most recent post or the most recent handful of posts–e.g., blogs with neither archives nor “older post” controls, or blogs that show “older posts” one. post. at. a. time, with no monthly or weekly archive functions. Such is life.
• Relatively few bloggers are adopting light-text-on-dark templates (although I was astonished to see a highly-touted new WordPress template that’s exactly that)…but there are some, and one or two that use the even worse black-text-on-dark or purple-text-on-black template, or something other that actively resists reading. I usually take the hint.

So there’s an update, such as it is. Now, off to make sense of those 88 items tagged “OA” in delicious. I would have sworn it was only a dozen or so…

Oh, by the way: Lulu’s summer free delivery sale ends either today or tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, back to the book project…

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

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

Remember this post, all of–what–two days ago? Which was “an update to “The new project: update 1,” which was an update to “We grow too soon old..”?

Toward the end of the post, there’s a section “What’s next?” beginning with this paragraph:

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

Then I say that I’ll probably pick up directories from LibWorld, eventually…and maybe even try some liblog blogrolls to see whether they yield anything.

Well…what hasn’t really happened is “some other work.” That’s not quite true. I’ve dealt with a number of small projects, household chores, discussing a Big Trip (one night, two days, but it’s a start), etc…

The other work that’s still being neglected? Writing stuff for the September Cites & Insights. I haven’t done any of that since the August issue came out, which was almost three weeks ago. And, for some reason, I’m resisting starting again, even as I get some great new possibilities for essays.

Maybe it’s a summer slump. Maybe it’s distraction. Maybe I just need a longer break from that particular style of writing.

Oh, I will be starting some other writing–definitely, probably Monday, maybe even earlier. But, you know, the September issue could come out as late as August 31…or, for that matter, as late as September 30. (Or I could have a nice chunky issue that y’all might find worthwhile and that really doesn’t require any new writing…)

Anyway, instead of forging ahead with other writing, I did look through the book for liblog directories, and found fewer than I remembered. I picked up those plus Libdex (almost forgotten but not quite gone). Sorted the 681 candidates, checked for duplicates and blogs already covered, resulting in 275 possibilities. I knew that a big chunk of those were Iranian, and that probably very few of the Iranian blogs were in English…so, instead of setting it aside, I decided to give it a “what the heck” hour or so this morning.

I’m done–and the whole 275 probably took less than 3.5 hours total (maybe 4). I got a slightly better yield than I expected, actually: 49 new liblogs (most of them for the broad look, not the deep look; most of them Australian) and 223 more exclusions (mostly Iranian–and, I think, more disappeared blogs than non-English blogs). I also looked at the Google Directory of personal library & information science blogs; I don’t know how many are in the directory, but exactly one [1] of them was new to me.

The status

So, as of now, the broad look includes 1,071 liblogs, and I have a list of 720 others that appear in one directory or another but are either defunct, non-English, official, or not a liblog at all.

Now to spend the weekend doing, well, weekend stuff [farmer's market, mowing, vacuuming, reading, eating, walking over to buy some olive oil from the nearby producer, with luck deciding on a trip date & making reservations...]. And the week ahead getting a strong start on a project that I’ll talk about when it’s done.

Eventually–after the project is at a pause stage and I’ve decided what to do with C&I for now–I’ll come back to this and decide whether to try 50-100 blogrolls, and whether or not to add the GPR 3 blogs with 2+ current posts to the deep look pool.

At a later eventually, sometime this fall, I’ll start the data massaging and writing.

One thing I’m sure of: Whatever results from this process will not include writeups or profiles of individual blogs. If you want those, you need to buy But Still They Blog (and maybe The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008). Oh, and if I publish portions of BSTB in C&I (one option for September, if I want to stick with other writing even longer), those portions will not include profiles.

Now, off to the weekend. Enjoy yours!

I’m not going to do the Spam Comment of the Day (with 40+ each day to choose from, it would be one way to have lots of posts, but not a great one)…but sometimes, well…

• Someone trying to build linklove for a comic-book site says “I’m damned relieve that they dropped ed norton. What a pompous $#. Time for a new hulk.” That’s a comment on “But Still They Blog: Four more profiles and a rationale.”
• Someone else–no, make that three people in a row–all tell me “I’m going golfing! It was way to nice out to be in the office all afternoon.” No, Will Manley wasn’t one of them–he doesn’t go to an office and he knows the difference between “too” and “to.” These three “people,” all with different names, UK email addresses, and different golf thingies they want to sell, responded to “Does every librarian need to be an involved expert on everything?”
• And here’s the killer–the reverse compliment: “This post is useless without pics ” – somebody trying to get me to watch online episodes of a TV show I have no interest in.

Procrastinating? What an accusation! (I can say this: There really weren’t many liblog directories in the LibWorld book. Since another task ran short, I did pick up one or two, plus the old Libdex directory and something else, for a candidate pool of 681 blogs, which yields 275 actual candidates. I’m pretty sure 2/3 of them are Iranian blogs in Farsi or other scripts; if that’s true, it will be a very fast scan. When I get around to it.)

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

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

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

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

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

The candidates

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

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

The results

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

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

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

Slightly more detailed results

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

Casual observations

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

Quick observations:

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

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

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

Then

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

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

Now

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

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

Future

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

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

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

…and too late smart.

The setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

The occasion

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

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

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

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

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

The two levels

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

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

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

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

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

The breakthrough (the forehead-slap moment)

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

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

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

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

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

The results (so far)

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

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

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

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

No promises

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

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

Anyone want to set up a site containing worthwhile essays for current and would-be leaders (and managers) within the library field, about leadership, management and some of the issues library leaders need to be aware of?

Anyone want to pay for the site (minimal) and for maintaining and building high-quality material on that site, and encouraging participation and feedback from people in the profession?

If so, then do I have a deal for you…

This one’s sort of a surprise. I spent roughly 2.5 years as editorial director for the PALINET Leadership Network, which became the Library Leadership Network, which became a LYRASIS service. Working as a part-time contractor, I straightened up/edited/reorganized a whole bunch of material that PALINET had acquired (and continued to license) from the original Library Leadership Network, wrote a bunch of original articles, got contributions for a while from a panel, and put together a lot more articles with the help of more than three dozen library bloggers who were pleased to make posts available.

The whole thing started as a wiki (and some day I’ll use MediaWiki markup without twitching slightly). Then it moved to a Drupal site as part of a LYRASIS initiative to broaden the network’s sources and services…which meant retouching all the articles and, in the process, consolidating them into 189 longer and more substantial articles.

In March, as some of you know, LYRASIS stopped funding me as editorial director.

This week, LYRASIS announced that the Library Leadership Network would shut down at the end of June 2010.

Meanwhile…

All the articles I was responsible for carried (and carry) a Creative Commons BY-NC license, which means they’re freely available and can be copied for any purpose that doesn’t carry a direct charge.

When I knew my tenure at LLN was over, I started copying the articles that were primarily work I had done–which turns out to be 104 of the 189 articles (omitting articles that consisted of Leader’s Digest material, articles sourced from the original LLN, articles from the LLN Peer Panel and the PLN Challenge).

While I haven’t gone through those articles and excised *portions* that were from Leader’s Digest, that wouldn’t be an enormous effort.

What remains is partly my original writing (some of it excerpted from other writing I’ve done), partly–mostly, I think–articles consisting of combinations of credited blog posts by library people and some original commentary.

A future home?

With some appropriate level of commitment and compensation, I could see turning this into a new site, continuing to add new material and update existing material, and finding ways to encourage direct participation. I can’t see spending as much time on it as I spent on LLN, but I also wouldn’t be looking for equal compensation.

If this sounds interesting and you either work for, are, or know of some group (association, division, whatever) that could make this happen, get in touch–waltcrawford at gmail dot com–and we can talk.

• The site needs to be open to all readers at no cost–the CC BY-NC license would apply on a new site as well.
• Updated 4:45 p.m.: The site can, of course, have ads (text or banner), sponsorship or both. The requirement is that the material be freely available.
• I think the site should encourage conversation, but I also think lightweight tools to do that need to be used, and that it needs to work even if there isn’t much conversation.
• I’d be happy to work on organizing the site, which I think needs to run on HTML one way or another. (I could see doing this using WordPress. I could see doing it using Drupal, with somebody else doing the heavy lifting. I could not readily see turning everything back into wiki form, frankly!)
• If I’m involved, I’d need some medium-term assurances…

If nothing comes up, I’ll probably look at the content again, see how much of it should be adapted for use in C&I or elsewhere, and possibly find a home for it as a static set of pages. (One such home has already been suggested…but, sigh, it’s a wiki.) That’s really not ideal.

We seemed to have close to 50,000 pageviews per month for articles on the wiki site (late in 2009), which suggests there’s a real readership for this stuff. I don’t think I’d have too much trouble restarting the network of blogger permissions, if the sponsorship/support makes sense.

Interested? Get in touch.

A two-parter:

ALA

I’m still very much looking for (a) sponsorship of Cites & Insights, (b) some other part-time/telecommuting situation that would yield some revenue (and give me a solid reason to keep going to ALA), (c) both.

One good time to discuss this would be during ALA Annual in Washington, D.C.

My current schedule is such that I could meet with people pretty much any time Friday from, say, noon on; any time Saturday, period (at this point); or Sunday between 2 and 5:30 or 6:00 (or possibly Sunday over dinner).

As usual, I’ll be traveling mostly without technology (except for a cell phone), so ideally, any meeting should be arranged beforehand–my email address is waltcrawford at gmail dot com.

Link Love

That’s what comment spammers are trying to get, and here’s a few of today’s highlights:

• Apparently, my site is “on the air in the radio” with posts “truly great and bookmarked.” People still bookmark individual blogs? (As for “on the air in the radio,” one can only surmise…)
• It’s reassuring that “Coming here to this site wasn’t such a bad idea after all” (responding to my post about a possible C&I Executive Edition–the only response I’ve received to what was apparently a pointless idea)
• Also good to know that my blog “keeps getting better and better” with “a lot more ideas and originality” than my old posts–of a couple of weeks ago–that “don’t offer as much insight.” That’s the oddly complimentary-while-insulting start to a long comment about getting ad revenue…
• Several instances of Ye Olde Standard Spam Compliment, e.g. “Great blog post. Really looking forward to read more.” At least the four most recent occurrences were to posts that discussed something other than C&I issues and the business of the blog! There’s also “Your blog is so informative ; keep up the good work!!!!”–attached to a note on free shipping for C&I books. Well, that is pretty informative!!!! isn’t it?
• Fortune cookie comments are always amusing, e.g., “Just write like you’re talking to your friends. And soon, they will be.” (Attached to one of the more controversial posts lately…)
• Then there are the truly mysterious cases, e.g. “Hello, The Burden of your blog is very good to me, I hope more alternate with you this Motive.”
• And the argumentative ones–such as one moderately long one that begins “Good luck getting people behind this one. Though you make some VERY fascinating points, youre going to have to do more than bring up a few things that may be different than what weve already heard…” and continues in that apostrophe-free manner. Oddly enough, that one–while not being a slam-dunk for spam points–has a name attached that makes it abundantly clear that it’s spam.
• I’m delighted that “Nicholas Sparks is my favorite author!”–I guess (haven’t really read Sparks)–but it’s totally irrelevant to the post it was attached to.
• A lot of spam attached to my post about spam, perhaps not surprisingly…one or two already noted, plus “I still prefer the novel instead the film, it just not able to put everything in the 2 hours show.” and “Sorry that I found too late … ” and “For me, as a poet, it was very interesting!”…and more, several more.

Spam. You gotta love it. It’s amazing how much of this stuff shows up on other blogs…although I suppose it’s great for comment counts.

Two miniposts for the price of one!

Gold star

I would be remiss if I did not mention that this here blog received a gold star from Salem Press in its library blog thingie, particularly since they were very quick to move this blog from Public Library Blogs (!) to General Blogs (I was hoping for Quirky, but you can’t always get what you want) after I let them know…

(There seems to be no shortage of links to the Salem Press list, so the lack of one here shouldn’t be an issue.)

Quick expert advice from librarians about web tools

Here’s an easy two-part test for modern librarians–or, better yet, just those who are considered web specialists. They’re honest questions, and presumably y’all should be able to answer them on the spot, in the comments:

1. I have a fully-formatted book ms. done using Word 2007, but also in PDF. How do I convert it to epub (without DRM), retaining as much of the formatting as possible? I even have Calibre, if that helps.
2. OK, so I have the new Facebook privacy tools now, but I just looked at my Privacy settings and I don’t understand what’s going on here:

Note: This is a straight screen capture, cropped but with no other changes. You may have to scroll right to see what I’m really interested in.

To wit: What does “Other” mean? How can I find out?

I await responses with some interest. Based on other discussions, I assume that any employable web services librarian should have answers…

Right up front: I’ve been guilty of this before and probably will be again.

As I was working on a Zeitgeist piece, I looked at a nicely-done 1,300-word essay. On a national newspaper website. About one aspect of social networking. With some interesting and slightly controversial things to say, some of them certainly open to argument.

The very first comment detailed the length of the essay–how many words, how many characters, how many sentences, average number of letters per word, length of longest sentence–and ended with a note suggesting that there was no content, or at least that the commenter hadn’t read it.

Understand: The commenter didn’t disagree with what was being said–the commenter was trashing the essay based on its length (apparently). Several other commenters offered variants of the old “tl; dr” brushoff–that is, “too long; didn’t read.” (I rarely see that on liblogs–maybe library folks actually have more than ten-second attention spans, or at least believe that “tl; dr” leaves one open to accusations of subliteracy.)

I’m not going to argue that people damn well should read longer essays. After all, 1,300 words is just a bit less than two pages of C&I, or three or four pages of a typical trade paperback, or one-third of a typical In the library post, or nine Friendfeed posts. If that’s so much text it makes your brain explode or your eyes hurt, who am I to argue.

dr? dc

But, well…

If you didn’t read the article or post, why are you commenting on it?

Equally, if you read the article or post and have nothing to say about the topic or the substance of the post or article… why comment on it?

Because you know the writer hangs on your every word so much that she will at least appreciate knowing you dropped by? Because you’re so damned important that you must respond? Because you’re a frustrated graffitist? Because you have no life?

I think all of usmany of us do this sort of thing–or equally vapid responses–once in a while. (Yes, that’s a preventive strikeout: I was about to commit a universalism, and I damn well should know better.)

It works both ways. I waste time on FriendFeed. (I also use FriendFeed, and maintain friendships on FriendFeed, and gain valuable insights on FriendFeed. And sometimes I waste time on FriendFeed–the activities aren’t mutually exclusive.) As many categories as I’ve hidden, as rarely as I Follow anybody new, I still see dozens of posts (mostly from Twitter, but not all) of the “what’ll I have for breakfast / I just had X for dinner / I just posted from Y” flavor, stuff that for me is almost exclusively in the “who cares?” category–just as some of my posts here fall into the “who cares?” category for some, maybe most, occasionally all readers.

I don’t believe I’ve ever found any reason to comment on a “what I had for breakfast” FF item by asking who cares or saying “don’t clutter up the feed with that crap” or anything of the sort. If I don’t care, why would I take the time to comment? (And, for that matter, if I don’t care, how does that imply that nobody else could possibly care?) I’m dead certain I’ve left equivalent responses on some posts and FF messages, however, and I’m sure I will in the future.

And I’ll be (trivially) wrong to do so.

As of that last period, this post contains 570 words. That’s probably too long for some of you–but I suspect that people who can’t handle 600, 800, or 6,000 words aren’t among my audience anyway.

By the way: I’m tagging this “Net Media”–but I no longer believe that term has much of any meaning, and I’m also doubtful about “Social Media.” That’s an essay I’ll be writing one of these days, probably in C&I. 636 words. My work here is done (645).

OK, that’s it–four offensive comments attached to three posts, none of the comments done in a way that gets caught automatically. In all cases, signed with a name or pseudonym that has no meaning to me.

Enough.

Here’s the new policy, with the big changes first:

• Patently offensive posts will be followed with replies that (a) include the email signature, and (b) as much as I can, identify the owner of the IP address. So, you know, if you’re sending obnoxious messages from, oh, say, an international law firm with headquarters in New York and London, I’ll be only too happy to say “This offensive message came from the IP #, which according to WHOIS is owned by XX law firm.”
• I’m the judge of what’s patently offensive.
• “Patently offensive” does not have anything to do with whether you agree with me or not. I love a good discussion and even disagreement. None of these posts fell into that category.
• Pseudonymous posts and those from imaginary names and email addresses are treated more roughly than signed posts.
• If this doesn’t solve the problem, I’ll proceed to turning on moderation completely–so no comments are posted until I approve them. I’d rather not do that.

I’m sure you know who you are. I didn’t save the previous offensive messages, so don’t know whether it’s the same IP address in all cases (but wouldn’t be surprised).

Don’t like my blog? Fine. Go away. Write your own damn blog. Your oh-so-humorous “senior” comments aren’t that funny and are that annoying. Nobody is forcing you to read my stuff, and I’m explicitly encouraging you not to. I’m sure somebody who works in an international law firm has other means of amusement.

This blog began on April 1, 2005–five years ago.

Well, technically, it began earlier, but the first post appeared on April 1 (thanks to WordPress’ postdating feature), so that was the official launch date. Not by accident.

To date:

• 1,134 posts–which is 140 more than on April 1, 2009, but that’s a little misleading, since I deleted some posts earlier in March (posts that mirrored those on another blog and had to do with a former place of work…no content was lost in this operation). It appears that there have been 189 new posts over the last 12 months.
• 3,435 comments, up from 3,022 last April 1–413 for the year, which is down about one-quarter from the previous year. Remarkably, the long-term ratio of comments to posts is still 3:1, although it’s much lower than that (2.2:1) for the past year.
• FeedBurner shows 860 feeds as of right now. (That figure drops every weekend, then comes back, sometimes a little higher, by midweek. Hey, it’s Google: Numbers are always approximate, right?)
• Sessions: Due to server changes, I can only go back to mid-November 2009. For the four month period November 30, 2009-March 30, 2010 (Urchin tends to run a day late), I see 186,675 sessions (1,543/day average); multiplying by three (and traffic’s been pretty consistent over the last four months, so that may be legitimate), I get 560K for the year–a 14% increase over the previous year, which brings things back to 2008 traffic levels.
• Pageviews: 492,683 (4,072/day), which extrapolates to 1.48 million for the year–29% up from the previous year.
• IP Addresses: 16,490, a little over one-third of the previous year–and I don’t believe it’s reasonable to triple that figure.

“Make of those numbers what you will” continues to be good advice. In March-May 2009, among the 514 liblogs studied for But Still They Blog, Walt at Random was 59th most prolific (58th in 2008), 32nd most verbose (24th in 2008) and 29th most commented-on (56th in 2008)–and had the 74th longest posts and 80th most comments per post. Hard to say what, if anything, to make of those figures.

As noted last year, given full-text feeds (and server changes), “most popular posts” is particularly meaningless, but here they are anyway, for the four-month period November 30, 2008-March 30, 2009, omitting overhead pages:

joshing-spoofing-and-damage           1,985
mystery-collection-disc-2        1,979
citizendium-and-the-memory-of-water         1,970
cites-on-a-plane-2-this-time-its-for-keeps      1,019
cites-insights-78-available        1,017
liblog-landscape-opinions-requested             1,014
library-blogs-and-newspaper-columns          1,011
one-small-new-years-resolution-thanks-dorothea     1,002
bloggers-salon-palisades-not-avila     999
reading-level                            994
ragged-preliminary-thoughts-on-conversations-and-unhermiting 985
of-chaos-and-stability-two-minor-mini-posts             979
almost-there-trimming-the-sidebar   966
responding-as-politely-as-possible     953
the-long-and-short-of-blogs-but-still-they-blog-4      857
lita-at-midwinter-2010-a-publicity-update    769
ebooks-outsell-pbooks-my-own-story            760
back-in-the-market                  721

That’s a mysterious list–particularly since it includes a couple of very old posts, including one with no meaning whatsoever in this time period (“bloggers salon palisades not avila”–which was relevant for the 2008 ALA Annual Conference!). The boldface items are posts that actually appeared within the past year.

Here’s what I said near the end of last year’s egopost:

Still blogging, still random, still with more readers than I’d expect.

Since this blog began, I’ve gone through three employers, two jobs, a new home (that we really love) and new city (that we also love) and more disruption than I’d have chosen…but that’s life.