This blog just made it to "a study of 60 library-related weblogs, written by one to four people (not big group affairs) as personal effort (not *library* or *course* weblogs), listed in one of three major directories of library-related weblogs, that appear to have fairly broad reach."
True, the fact that this blog was number 59 doesn't really mean that this blog is one of the best or that it has so many readers—but, hey, I had no idea that someone like Walt Crawford (author of First Have Something to Say
In "Investigating the Biblioblogosphere" (Cites & Insights 5:10, September 2005), Crawford quantifies the "reach" of a blog by using a formula that involved Bloglines readership and reported links from Google, MSN and AllTheWeb. Nope, this blog was not included because of its "reach." It was in the third group of blogs, which were those "in the top 40 of either Bloglines subscriptions or the top 30 in Google links, MSN links, or AllTheWeb links."
Crawford never actually goes into a detailed discussion of why he did the study, but the following provides a clue:
How many of these 60 blogs fall into the idle chatter and semiliterate categories attacked by people who should know better? A few are rich in the personal lives of the bloggers, but most aren’t. I wouldn’t accuse any of these bloggers of lacking writing skills. I would be hard-pressed to choose even a dozen I don’t consider worthwhile.If you would like to know more about the context behind his remarks, see "Of Bloggers and 'Blog People,'" especially the next-to-last paragraph, which starts with, "To understand why librarian-bloggers are up in arms..."
For a list of all the 60 blogs included in the study, check out "The biblioblogosphere: Enabling ego searches" (no click-able links) or the MS Excel file with all the metrics (URLs are available, but not click-able either).
Thanks to Hoi for the heads up!
