Steffers writes “Yahoo reports a study has found that many internet users are not creating blogs. Between 2 and 7 percent of internet users have created blogs and even fewer (about 10% of bloggers) update their blogs daily.
What about Lisnews-ites? Do you bloggers out there update yours regularly or (like me) infrequently?”
Fake blogs?
This has been a “blog-of-interest” among some people I ‘know’ over the past few days (all bloggers):
http://www.iudaybyday.blogspot.com/
I guess this kid had a class assignment to try to reach a certain number of hits, and he went about it by writing a lot of incendiary stuff, posing as a redneck frat boy. He came out today to say it was all for an assignment but he certainly had me fooled.
I certainly am an active blog reader (not so much with the writing), and I guess this serves as a reminder that you don’t really know ‘who’ you’re reading, or who’s reading you.
Re: Blogging has yet to take off?
I try to post every day, but because as I have limited my subject area to things having to do with libraries and politics, there is just not all that much fodder every day. (I have been cheating by writing on more general things and pinging some of the big boys to attract readership). There’s also the small matter of work, of course…
This should be a poll 🙂
On average I update:
* I don’t blog/lj
* I started a blog/lj, and haven’t been back after the initial luster wore off
* I blog/lj infrequently
* I blog/lj once a week
* I blog/lj every couple of days
* I blog/lj almost everyday, except for my days off (ie: weekends)
* I blog/lj everyday
* I blog/lj several times a day
* I get paid to blog/lj (at any rate above…) (ie: official job/work duty, or celebrity blogger)
— Ender, Duke_of_URL
®
much of a muchness
I used to keep a blog on Blogger but then got involved with LiveJournal (I had so many friends with LJs) that I began my own LJ and now do all of my blogging there. I have not used the blog that I apparently qualify for here at LISNews (actually, technically, two, one for my work address and one for my home address). It seems like too much of a muchness!
But I don’t update my LJ as much as many people do, sometimes only once or twice a week. I think I post more in the comments of other people’s blogs than I do in my own.
Readership numbers disappointing for the effort
I’ve had a blog for more than a year:
Infothought blog
I updated it every day for a while. But I found the lack of readership very discouraging (100-150 readers). It takes a lot of effort to write a daily column. Yet having such a small reach didn’t seem to be worth it. Yes, of course those readers found it good, but there weren’t many of them.
There’s only a few people on the A-list. The bulk of blogs will have only a handful of readers. Nothing wrong with that in a global sense. But sometimes far from the hype.
Seth Finkelstein
Re:Readership numbers disappointing for the effort
Reading this made me want to find all my old LISNews stats, wich I can’t seem to do. I’ve got about 100 cds worth of backups going back a few years, but I think the first year or so I had in print only, and I can’t find it.
I know for months, maybe the first year, I was happy with 100, then, slowly, the numbers went up, and up, and after maybe 2 years we hit 1000, and now, 4 years later, we do pretty good. All I ever wanted was 1,000, and we’ve went well past that.
Hopefully we’re still growing.
It takes along time to build an audience.
Seth is one of the few blogs written by one person I read on a regular basis, and probably the only non-librarian one, other than Matt Haughey.
I agree, Blogs Are For Talkers, most of the time I can talk about the site, if I didn’t have that I don’t know I’d have anything to write about.
Who reads these puppies?
I started my blog as a cure for writer’s burnout. I was a journalist for 15 years and when I left my last newspaper I simply quit writing. I’m writing once again and am enjoying it once again. I’m posting on the average 4 times a week.
My first readers were family, just letting them know what my wife and I were up to. After a few months I decided to check the stats and saw about 200 “unique visitors” per month.
I switched from Blogger to Movable Type and allowed the software to ping other sites. I say “allow” as I originally considered the blog semi-private among family and friends. For me pinging was an act of bravery to put my writing infront of the public again.
For the first time since switching over I checked my stats and was shocked to find and my “circulation” jumped to 2,070 “unique visitors” last month.
Who in the world is reading my blog? I haven’t the foggiest notion. I’ll have to study the stats some more.
Say what?
I seem to have missed something. Is there some kind of international law, a Geneva Convention for web surfers, that says we also have to keep web logs?
If so: Like, whyever for?
I don’t even check mainstream news sites on a daily basis except for Arabnews.com and I certainly don’t find the greater mass of smelly humanity interesting enough to let them get to know me. Some of the people out there are best kept out there.
I post every day…
It’s kind of a truth in advertising thing… although it’s not really weblog in the “here’s what I found in my toe lint today and my personal political manifesto” traditional sense.
Am I blogging?
I have 3 blogs, so I’m blogging about 3 times a day, sometimes more. I have blogs drafted that I’ve never posted because they need more research and thought. I don’t count (I use free sites), and don’t care. I just like to write. And it is easier for the people I care about to read my blogs than to attempt to send attachments, which I used to do.
There are excellent blogs, both individual and group. The best usually have a narrowly defined focus such as education, religion, law, politics, etc.
Careful about searchbots in stats
Movable Type is far more Google search friendly than Blogger. You have to be careful with the statistics, though, since including searchbots will drive up your stats without being real readers.
Seth Finkelstein
posting
I post around 2-3 times a week. Not everyday, and sometimes my posts are very short.
irregular blogging
My blog’s personal, so I don’t get to do it at work.
Combined with the 1 machine/many users thing at home, this means that daily blogging isn’t really practical.
The main reason I started blogging was to keep track of where I’d been and how useful sites were- bookmarks and favourites don’t really fulfil that function too well- and to give people I know a single place to see what I’d found useful.
I work as a librarian, but I’m also a member of a self-build housing co-op amongst having other areas of interest, so when I find things I like, I put them in the blog so mates who are librarians/LIS students, or have interests that coincide with mine, can see what I’ve been looking at.
I haven’t really considered a wider audience much, although I did get a mention in the LISblogs list, and get pinged by several blogs lists.
Re:Careful about searchbots in stats
Yes, indeed. I was checking the domain information this morning and found that for some reason, Googlebot visited my site 270 times between February 24-25. Every other day it’s been was only once or twice.
Now I’m really confused 🙂
Re:Who reads these puppies?
On an older portion of my personal website I used to have a stat tracker. It would tell me not only how many unique hits I got but the country of origin of their ip address. Pretty interesting… although it was a tiny bit disconcerting to see “Unknown” get a few hits.
Re:Careful about searchbots in stats
It’s the “deep crawl”. Google does a complete crawl around once a month, and more frequent surface crawls.
Re:Careful about searchbots in stats
good point. The current LISNews log shows 128494 hits, 2111 of which are from googlebot.
[[email protected] logs]$ grep googlebot http://www.lisnews.com_access_log | wc -l
2111
[[email protected] logs]$ wc -l http://www.lisnews.com_access_log
128494 http://www.lisnews.com_access_log
My first guess is about 10% of all traffic @LISNews is bots each month.
Re:Fake blogs?
I hadn’t heard about that one, but though it seems pretty fake, it is, sadly, not too bad an approximation of some of the students who come through my office here at IU.
Blogging HAS taken off
Most TV viewers do not have their own TV show, so does that mean that television hasn’t taken off yet? That’s their logic, which makes no sense. So what if only a small portion of web users create and maintain blogs? I have enough feeds to keep track of as it is!
I blog infrequently. I try for at least one interesting post a week, but sometimes even that doesn’t happen. However, I read a number of blogs, including LISNews, and frequently post replies to entries. If my responses are worthy of a post themselves, I’ll post on my blog with a trackback to the article/entry I’m responding to. That doesn’t happen very often, and it only works well if the entry I’m responding to uses trackback.
Re:Careful about searchbots in stats
Note that just counting raw lines (“wc -l”) will give a very high number – that will include all the images that go into a displayed page. Since Google doesn’t retrieve images in the normal crawl, it won’t be a comparable number.
Unique IP’s is a good number. Unique IP’s retrieving the front page is even better.
Seth Finkelstein
bloggers and culture 🙂 Apparently, and this has been noted here, this requirement doesn’t stop most folks from blogging. 😉
I don’t really blog much but am tempted. But then I realize I’d have to think of something to say.
Most blogs are probably pretty worthless. The most interesting front for me though has been the political blogs. talkingpointsmemo.com atrios.blogspot.com, calpundit and daily kos all get my attention regularly. Guess you can tell I’m a lefty.
It was interesting to see how it helped shape and then define the Dean campaign.
And it’s interesting to see how it’s affecting the various media dealing with the political culture in D.C. Some bloggers kept the issue of Bush’s Nat. Guard (non}service afloat. The Plame affair will get more press too because of blogging. I think next we’ll be seeing more attention to the 9/11 panel and the stonewalling the whitehouse has given it (9/11-gate anyone?).
Let’s face it, the media is lazy and dishonest, so bloggers will likely keep pointing them down various paths until they start performing as watch dogs again instead of lap dogs.
Blogging as a bit of fun
Blogging for me serves as a form of catharsis, a creative outlet and a challenge (I’d like to get more than 29 readers).
Aside from all that stuff about its use as an information-sharing tool, I just like it because I can pretend to be a columnist (think Carrie in ‘Sex and the City’ but in a smaller city).
Re:Fake blogs?
I wasn’t fooled by that IU guy. He tried, begged, whatever, over at resource-zone.com to get the ODP editors to list his site. I’m sure he got a few hits out of that silliness alone. Looking at the content of the site it seemed clear he was desperate for hits.