18 of 30 - "Blogology IV" OR "How I Spend My Free Time"
In order to finish on schedule with the 30 in 30 thing I will need to make a post every 9.5 hours. I don't know how I got so far behind.
Anyway, continuing my scientific investigation of the blogosphere, I've done a study of 20 livejournals on my friends list1, based on numbers of entries, comments and other quantifiable information. The results are as follows:
The Study
Friends / Friends-of Ratio
Many megabloggers see this as the ideal gauge of how good a megablogger they are. While many megabloggers do clearly have noticable ratios in the 0.3 to 1 to 0.6 to 1 ratio, it is of course quite common for people to add anyone who "friends" them to their friends list, causing for example excellent megablogger theuglyvolvo to have a ratio of 1.024 to 1. Similarly, most people seem to be between 0.8 and 1.2. This journal: 1.196. Average of studied group: 1.16.2
Comments / Entry
I've found what I think to be the best determinant of a healthy megablog to be the ratio of comments received to entries. The two best megablogs in the study have a huge lead in this category: "the bloggist" himself, winner of the 2004 Frasky Awards for best megablog and best entry incomple at 37.15 followed by theuglyvolvo at 24.79. The majority of people seem to fall between 6 and 2 comments per entry. This journal: 5.430.
Friends-of / Month
Another important indicator of megabloggistic success I've found is friends-of / month (of having a livejournal). In this category theuglyvolvo has a huge lead of 20.6, followed by giantlaser with 16.7, and incomple at 8.2. I'd imagine however, that new journals will have a skewed higher result as I hypothesize there's a fast increase in friends with the advent of a livejournal. Three livejournals had a result of 2.80, and discounting the two highest the average of those studied was 3.68. This journal: 6.6 (fourth highest)
Comments Received / Comments Made
An interesting thing to look at regardless of whether or not one fancies themselves a megablogger is comments received / comments made. A high number like 3.68 (fre3thinker, ) can simply mean that someone doesn't bother to reply to things, but a number less than .6 surely means that one has a problem with people replying to them at a rate far below average. Better practice that commenting! Average of studied group: 1.232 (and most are within .4 of that). This journal: 1.2440.
Also determined that this journal is currently averaging 26.2 entries per month.
Next I think I'll look at a number of randomly selected livejournals. These ones were selected to take livejournals I hypothesized were good examples of a megablog or underblog, and as such are far from a random sampling of livejournals.
Also I didn't use anyone who didn't have "friends-of" displayed in their userinfo. This prevented me from using several livejournals I was interested in looking at.
Related
Interesting Livejournal of the Day: giantlaser in Iraq
1actually 10% of them aren't on my friends list
2Yes I am aware that proper ratios should not have numbers less than one. For simplicity's sake however I decided not to convert numbers like 0.3 and 0.6 to 3:1 and 5:3.