Stephen Abrams has an interesting post, itself a riff on a post by Cory Doctorow, about the rise in blog usage.
Here at FRL, which is more of a personal blog rather than one heavily promoted and marketed, I can see the blog-as-trend phenom in action. Look at the statistics for freerangelibrarian.com for the first quarter of this year and last:
Jan 2006: 404119 requests, 190970 pages
Feb 2006: 378640 requests, 168411 pages
Mar 2006: 461715 requests, 216565 pages
Mar 2005: 177849 requests, 75963 pages
Feb 2005: 129930 requests, 55500 pages
Mar 2005: 177849 requests, 75963 pages
So even a lightly-promoted library blog should see similar trends. Miriam? Thoughts?
Posted on this day, other years:
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Doesn’t follow. You have a relatively high profile (anti-straw-man – I said “high profile”, not “international tabloid celebrity”), so it’s possible the growth you see isn’t typical.
Also, did you account for spammers and spiders and ‘bots and feed aggravators? Those can distort stats dramatically.
I’m not seeing more spam than I was at the beginning, so I don’t think that’s a factor. I do think that any blog that has been around for a while will show more usage over time because the inevitable interesting-to-someone post will get linked and then clicked on. But… in terms of effort related to readership, I think FRL’s example doesn’t argue *against* blog growth. My blog is too uneven and too infrequently updated to go far on its own.
I’m not sure how much real growth there is, but also, I think there’s some questions as to where the growth is going. My conjecture is that it’s going first to increasing numbers of people chatting with friends (MySpace), then to generally popular pundits, then a little to local A-list experts, and last of all to the Zlist pundits. So doubling of the bogosphere doesn’t necessarily translating into doubling to the average blog-writer.
It’s tricky to establish this, though, because there definitely is an increase in automated retrievals of pages, and that *will* affect everyone to some extent.
Two quick points on this topic. First, you have a highly focused blog on library technology and book reviews. It has become a very relevant source since so many other librarians and educators are reading and commenting on your entries. Second, as you write more content, more people will find your blog and participate. This happens through search engines, linking, and word of mouth. I would suspect your site statistics to continue rising.