Changes in frequency (But Still They Blog, 3)

To nobody’s surprise, this post is about Chapter 3 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

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

Changes in Frequency

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

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

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

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

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

Growth Blog Profiles

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

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This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 12:13 pm and is filed under C&I Books, Liblogs, Writing and blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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