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

I’m not going to do the little pop quizzes I did last year (and started in “Looking at the landscape“). Instead, I’ll introduce this post by saying it’s about Chapter 2 of But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007-2009, now available at the special introductory price of $29.50 paperback, $20 PDF.

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

Chapter 2: Rivers, Streams and Rivulets: Posting Frequency

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

How often do posts appear on a blog?

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

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

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

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

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

Liblogs profiled in Chapter 2

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

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

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