Blogger Meetup Tonight

The DC blogger meetup I organize is tonight at RFD in Chinatown at 7. Looks like we’ll have a good crowd.

Finding Local Blogs

Recently I have been hearing about two recently launched websites designed to help folks find blogs by geographic location. PlaceBlogger is a fairly straight-forward directory that has some aggregated content on the main page. Outside.in is much more powerful — it aggregates blog posts and allows you to view all the posts for a given neighborhood or zip code and navigate the results by category or search. While the designs of both sites could be much more elegant, they complement the many already existing informal local blog directories that have popped up in most cities. (Such as DCBlogs) In addition, at the blogger summit held last night the Washington Post revealed a local blog directory they are in the early stages of developing for this region that looks promising. These intermediary tools are essential if blogs are to reach beyond a small self-selecting community of readers and function as journalism in a serious way.

Rethinking College Park: An Update

Things have been kind of quiet around here lately for a couple reasons: I just successfully wrapped up my first semester of graduate school, and because most of my blogging energy has been dedicated to Rethink College Park, a new community website I am involved in.

Readers of this website may be familiar with the general concept of the site I described in May, or perhaps may have seen the announcement I posted after we launched last summer. However, I have said little about it since then.

In short, things are going very well. We summarized some of our accomplishments in December: we have averaged over 100 visitors a day (In a city of 25,000), published 95 posts and over 200 comments. Our posts have included everything from thoughtful essays on urban design, obscure documents we dredged up about controversial projects, and examinations of a secretive University-led development project. Most recently, we have posted detailed candidate surveys for an upcoming special election to fill two vacancies on the city council.

Furthermore, we have begun to build the infrastructure to make the effort sustainable in the long term. We have identified as a major goal for next semester as recruiting more writers and leaders for the organization. Although it is difficult to measure of the impact of the site, it’s clear that at the very least we are succeeding to create an open forum for the entire community — our first and primary goal.

To top it off, I just found out today we are the top hit if you google “I want to run for city council.” Either we’re doing something right, or there is a sore lack of this type of information on the web!

DC Bloggers Meetup in January

After several months of small Meetups, Patrick and I are putting together a meetup for January to re-start the group. Hope you can make it!

DC Blogger January Meetup
Jan. 17, 7:00 p.m.
RFD - 810 7th Street NW

How Do You Create a Popular Blog?

There’s plenty of sources for advice for new bloggers. However, there’s precious little quantitative data about what factors are the most important to building readership. Among the most obvious quantitative factors — posting frequency, number of external links, blogroll size, and simple longevity — which are the most important? In general, are there statistical relationships between any of these factors and readership?

I set about attempting to answer this question myself. In order to create a representative sample of blogs I decided to use the Truth Laid Bear traffic rankings, which contains a listing of the most popular 5,000 blogs on the web. This website compiled the traffic data from bloggers who have added the free traffic tracking service Sitemeter. Although my sample would be limited to bloggers who use the Sitemeter tool (almost entirely from the English-language blogosphere), as far as I could tell the TLB system was relatively free of non-blog websites and contain a wide variety of blogs. The traffic data would also be impacted by the site design choices of individual bloggers because meter readings can be affected by the complexity and size of the site and their placement within the page code.

In order to identify my pool I generated 50 numbers between 1 and 5,000 using this random sequence generator. I looked up the blogs corresponding with these 50 rankings on the TLB rankings, recorded the average number of visitors per day his database contained, and visited each site. For each blog I recorded several pieces of data. First, I recorded the approximate founding date, usually the earliest entry found through chronological archive pages. Although in some cases the first post was clearly labeled as such, in others the oldest posts just seemed to start right in, making it possible that still earlier posts were contained in older blogging systems. (In order to check this data I plan on running each URL through the Internet Archive.) Second, in order to get a measure of posting frequency I recorded the number of posts published between September 24th and 30th, 2006. The period is the last week of September of this year, free of any major holidays I am aware of. Lastly, I looked for the Sitemeter icon and recorded the “Average Visits Per Day” available from the summary page. In the course of the data collection I discovered the LTB data was at least six months out of date, which would introduce a chronological bias into my study excluding new sites.

Of the original 50, 9 sites were either not blogs or inaccessable (domains expired, site blank, etc), and 10 had no posts for the week in question. This group of 19 inactive blogs included two with announcements that they had been shut down by their owners, and several were short-term projects long abandoned by their owners. I decided to exclude this entire group because I wanted to study the function of active blogs updated at least once per week.

I then created two scatterplots for this n=31 data: one displaying the observed number of posts against the TLB/Sitemeter Average Daily Visits, and the other plotting the age (in days) against the daily visits. I then ran a simple linear regression analysis for each. In short, at this point age seems to be a better predictor for traffic than posting frequency.

Before I take the statistical analysis any further, I’ll need to collect more data. Up next, I’ll be collecting data relating to the number of blogs linking to each blog in my sample from Technorati, and adding to the sample set so that it contains 50 active blogs. I also think I will explore obtaining “snapshot” traffic data, available from the summary page of sites with public meters. Lastly, I need to clean up the age data as best I can using the Internet Archive. Then I’ll run some multivariate analysis to see if whether holding age constant posting more really results in more traffic, and if there are other statistical connections. I’m avoiding diving into the question of blogrolls because of the tedium involved, however it seems another relevant variable.

What do you think?

Research Help

I’m looking for any quantitative studies examining links between blog posting frequency, site readership, and/or in- or out-bound linking rates. I’d also be interested to see any related studies along the lines of Noor Ali-Hasan’s work. Post them as comments if you can help. Thanks!

Is Michigan Amazing?

“Michigan has a million stories to tell,” gushes MichiganIsAmazing.com, a new blog launched by Ann Arbor public relations company Hass MS&L. The blog will feature text, images, and video submitted and voted on by users showcasing “all the great things about our state.” Everyone who submits a story idea will receive a “small gift,” and winning submissions earn the author a free t-shirt. Early posts, apparently written by the company, tend towards the tabloid with posts about exotic mushrooms and zany photos. Unclear, however, are the goals of the site: the only advertisement displayed is from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and there’s no “about” page.

> MichiganIsAmazing.com

Update: In response to this post, they’ve added an about us page.