Now that I have your attention…
After going through another 50 candidate “great middle” liblogs, with more than usual where I couldn’t do the measures needed for full metrics, and after a couple of email conversations with bloggers who’ve volunteered to do translation (still needed: German), in which the terms above came up (not, oddly enough, in a pejorative manner), I’ve made one change.
Liblogs that meet the other criteria (not “official,” clearly either library-related or from a “library person,” at least one post between March 1 and May 31, 2006…if there are others, I’ll spell them out in the article), but where I can’t really determine the total length of all posts in March-May without doing too much work, will be included, but with partial metrics. I’ll have to do a second spreadsheet to make this work, with a smaller universe than the first spreadsheet, but I think it’s worth it.
There are just too many really interesting liblogs in the 21 (so far) that follow archiving practices that get in the way of word-count measurement.
It will still only be a chunk of the middle; how could it be otherwise?
Now, back to the cutting-and-pasting–well, after lunch and more yard work.
Update Monday, July 31: I’ve finished the first-round metrics. (A brief second round will follow, not related to individual blogs but gathering some overall information.)
The final tally: 197 blogs with full metrics and 16 blogs with partial metrics. For some reason, when I went back to the 21 blogs, I could run full measures for two of them. One turned out to be not remotely library-related or librarian-related. Three were organized such that I couldn’t even gather partial metrics (such as the starting date and number of posts during March-May 2006). And one of the remaining 30 blogs also fell into the “partial metrics” category.
So: For start date, number of entries, number of comments, comments per entry, and some other miscellany, I’ll be covering 213 blogs. For total length and average length of posts, I’ll be covering 197.
With luck (cross fingers), I’ll separate out the non-English taglines and post titles and send them to volunteer translators tomorrow; I’ll either find someone who knows German (or other languages I’ve ignored) or maybe post those phrases here…
