[Warning: we are entering the first anniversary week for See Also, so expect more navel gazing than usual this week. -SL]

In my first post to See Also, almost a year ago, I wrote about Walt Crawford’s first biblioblogosphere survey in Cites & Insights. I finished with this:

So the next time Crawford does his investigation, I hope that See Also will be right up there, and that I can thank my many (I’ll settle for several) loyal readers for making See Also such a success.

Well, Walt did it again, and this time See Also is indeed right up there. Of course, Walt did change his methodology and decided to look at the “Great Middle” this time rather than the liblogs with the greatest “reach” as he computed it. So that helps.

And there is a nice little fluke in that the data-collection period that Walt chose (March to May, 2006) includes the post Name that book: a fiction subject headings quiz. That post got 35 comments and ended up as the most-commented post in Walt’s survey. (Of course, eleven of those comments are from me….)

Walt asks:

I cited the title of the post with the most comments for each blog that has any comments. What conclusions can be drawn from those titles? Other than the obvious—new jobs, marriage, graduation from library school, homebuying and other major life events draw lots of comments—I’ll leave that exercise to others.

The conclusion I draw is: come up with a sorta funny audience-participation quiz, and watch the comments pour in.

Walt mentions the impact of feeds on blogs. With more people reading blogs via feed readers, it is less important (he believes) to post frequently and regularly, and that the size of the audience doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

I agree about the frequency of posting (I sure hope it’s true, given the summer doldrums around this here blog), with a minor caveat. For blogs just starting, I think it is important to post regularly–not every day, but at least once or twice a week. I think it is important for two reasons.

One, if you have just started a blog and can’t manage a few posts a week while it is all fresh and new and exciting and you have a lifetime’s worth of “backlog” to get out there, how on earth will you be able to keep it going in the long run?

And, two, I personally am reluctant to add new blogs to my aggregator. I have too much in there already to keep up with comfortably. So for me to pick up a new blog, I usually have to see it linked several times within a short period. I think that regular posting is more likely to lead to regular in-bound links. But that might just be me.

As for the second part (size doesn’t matter), I’m not sure I follow the reasoning. Walt says that “the hope now is to find the right audience, which might be anywhere from half a dozen friends to a few thousand strangers.” I would have thought that was always the hope; perhaps in the hype surrounding blogs a few years ago there were more people who thought they’d become rich and famous blogging? Now we all know that in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people. But I’m not sure what feeds have to do with that.

At the end of the issue, Walt notes that the project took a very long time and asks “was it worth it?“

That’s a tough one. I think a yearly round-up of the biblioblogosphere liblogs is a great idea, and I think Walt Crawford is a great person to do it: I don’t always agree with him, but I always respect what he has to say. It might also help that he is in the blogosphere but not of it, exactly.

But I’m afraid that this list left me a little cold. I value blogs and bloggers for their voice and their sensibility; I’d rather read Dorothea Salo (for example) blog about her cats than read most other people reveal the secret of life. And this kind of study doesn’t really capture much of that. I think I’d rather read a more qualitative write-up from Walt each year–one where he could exercise his own voice a bit more, and write about those voices that mean the most to him. But I realize that would be a very different project from the one he has undertaken these past two years. And others, who are more actively looking for new blogs to read may find it more useful than I do. Finally, the real worth of this surve may be as part of the historical record, when people wonder just what all these wacky “bloggers” were up to in the early 21st century.

In any case, thanks, Walt, for taking the time.

Tags:
walt_crawford,
liblogs,
survey