Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

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:

1. Average frequency of postings
2. Patterns of posting frequency, e.g., do people start out posting every day and then move to every week, or what?
3. Average longevity of a weblog, measured by looking at the time between the first post and the most recent one
4. Percent that last longer than 6 months or a year
5. Average readership
6. How persistent that readership is (I'm not saying these would be easy numbers to gather)
7. Average webloglogrollery
8. 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.)