Weblog Stat Questions If you
Weblog Stat Questions
If you check one of the weblog directories, you’ll see the ol’ 80:20 rule at work…except on the Web, that becomes the 80,000,000:20 rule. There are a heck of a lot of weblogs out there, but a random sampling of them shows that while they are sociologically interesting – the things that people care about! the way people write and think! wow! – only a handful are of enough appeal to get me back for a second visit. This doesn’t mean they’re not appealing to anyone or that they’re self-obsessed ramblings as some critics of weblogs have said. It just means that on the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people.
If weblogs shouldn’t be measured by mass market, broadcast standards according to which success is directly proportional to the number of readers (excuse me, I mean “eyeballs”), it’d be interesting to know the shape of weblog success. Is anyone – Ev? Dave? – keeping track of numbers such as:
- Average frequency of postings
- Patterns of posting frequency, e.g., do people start out posting every day and then move to every week, or what?
- Average longevity of a weblog, measured by looking at the time between the first post and the most recent one
- Percent that last longer than 6 months or a year
- Average readership
- How persistent that readership is (I’m not saying these would be easy numbers to gather)
- Average webloglogrollery
- Here’s a tough one to track: Is there a correlation between the degree to which a weblog is topic-specific and how long it lasts, how many people read it and how many weblogroll it?
What would these numbers tell us? Maybe nothing. They’re just numbers. Weblogging is going to roll along no matter what the numbers say. But why should the broadcasters be the only ones who know – or at least assert they know – the numeric shape of their market? (Ok, I’ll tell you why: because it’s easier to extrapolate to a mass market than it is to count the ripples made by rain on a pond.)
Covering My Ass: I recognize that it’s quite likely that there’s a prominent page that has all of these stats plus many more. I fully expect the response: “Yo, dude, haven’t you ever been to www.scriptingnews.com/weblogstats/answersyourdumbfuckingquestions.html?” My defense: I’ve made a career out of being ignorant in public.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Is this the ultimate source for the ubiquitous “on the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people” quote, or is there yet a deeper dource?
— Jack Krupansky
Bizarre that you should ask that today since yesterday I posted about the origins of that phrase: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004264.html
Well, the bizarre thing was that I had read Heather’s post, jumped to your blog, and searched for “15 people” and found this old post and not your latest post on the topic. It didn’t occur to me at the time to search for “fifteen people”, which is the syntax you used in your post, but guess what… even today, using your blog’s built-in search for “fifteen people” doesn’t find your 7/23 post. I’d say that’s bizarre, but so many of us have so much trouble providing a robust and current search feature for our own sites. You should have a disclaimer about search results not being current or at least giving that date for which they’re current. Or, maybe you’re dependent on the Google search API and you and us users are all screwed without recourse. In any case, that’s why I ended up making my bizarre comment.
But… my question remains unanswered… what is a permalink URL for your earliest use of the 15 people “maxim”. I would attribute it as “as popularized by David Weinberger, …”, which gets around the ultimate source confusion and reflects your role.
Can you correct my mispelling of “source” (“dource”)? I’d hate for digital archeologists a thousand centuries from now to discover my lousy typing skills.
— Jack Krupansky
Jack, I use a free search engine. It doesn’t index instantaneously.
The comments to the post you’re talking about – this one – has a pointer to a 1991 use of the phrase. That’s the earliest I’ve seen.