The Rest of the Liblogs (But Still They Blog, 12)

This post is about Chapter 12–the last chapter–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 Rest of the Liblogs

Here’s the full text of the chapter–except for the profiles!

This is the point in the book at which I should find profound meaning from these metrics. It’s the perfect opportunity for sweeping conclusions—if there were any.

You’ve seen smaller conclusions throughout the chapters. Yes, a fair number of bloggers have stopped (when has that not been true?). Yes, there seem to be a lot fewer new fairly-high-profile liblogs in 2008 than in previous years. Yes, most bloggers are blogging somewhat less (and very slightly longer).

And yes, some of that can probably be traced to FaceBook, Twitter and FriendFeed, along with the usual reasons—fatigue, changes in life and work, balance, boredom.

Underlying all that, however, liblogs still offer a broad, varied landscape of people with interesting and worthwhile things to say. Blogging may be dead (if you believe some pundits)…but still they blog.

The remaining liblogs—those that didn’t turn up in a previous chapter—aren’t “leftovers” by any means. A few of these are among my personal favorites, one or two are among those I choose not to comment on so as to avoid snark, several have gone by the wayside—and many just don’t have quite enough frequency, long enough posts or enough comments to stand out in a metric (or had metrics problems).

Again: metrics only measure quantity, not quality. You need to judge quality for yourself.

The Profiles

In this case (and this case only), the profiles are in alphabetical order, since I couldn’t come up with any better scheme.

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

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