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
Thinking I ought stop reading these posts since my book should be printing/shipping about now.
Thanks for doing this work, Walt.
Well, some of the posts have little nuggets that aren’t in the book–but you can definitely skip the article in the January 2010 Cites & Insights that combines these posts (minus the profile lists, of course). That one will be wholly repetitious. If I could ever figure out the Venn diagram of blog readers and C&I readers…I’m pretty sure it’s overlapping circles, not one circle contained within the other.
As to the nuggets, I know. I was just teasing you, Walt.
By the way, you’re welcome for the Thanks. I did my best not to do the work, but curiosity does matter, and that’s probably a good thing.
Whew. Just finished preparing the rest of the posts, which will appear between now and next Tuesday. Let’s see: Given my target of two posts a week, this covers me for the next six weeks, if I’m feeling unusually lazy.