True Confessions: Why I Blog
By Cohen, Steven M
Library Stuff Revisited Early in October, the folks behind Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) released a new feature that caused an uproar in the blogging community. You could actually figure out (with numerous mathematical steps) how many users subscribed to the feed for your blog (www.librarystuff.net/2007/08/ll/more-stats).
This suddenly made it easy to look at your own readership and others’ as well. Within seconds, I looked up my blog, saw my numbers, and began talking to myself. That number isn’t right, no way. It couldn’t be that high. So, I compared it with other library blogs. I have more subscribers than that librarian? I can’t believe she has more than me. I composed a few emails to family and friends asking them to take a look.
Why I Blog
OK, I am the first to admit that one of the reasons I blog is to get noticed. In the beginning, I started my Library Stuff blog to force myself to keep up with library news. I continued because it was doing wonders for my career. Then, I continued because I was in the position to use it to market companies for which I worked. Now, I blog for three equal reasons: to keep current, to market, and to seek attention.
I have always thought that the pure nature of blogs as public Web presences implies the author’s need to be noticed. Think about it for a moment. We play with our sites so that we can get in the top 10 results in the major search engines for certain keywords, and we don’t sell anything material in nature. In fact, we are selling our knowledge, and we want others to see it. Why would we make it public if there wasn’t a small part of our beings that didn’t wish for more readers? It’s human nature.
Checking Out the Numbers
I’m not a statistics addict, but I do check a few sites to see how good ol’ Library Stuff is faring. I look at my internal stats (powered by Google’s Urchin, www.urchin.com) each morning during my commute to work, but I also check a few other resources that measure popularity, some of which let you pit your statistics against others. Statistics can be fun, and they can be a valid measure of a person’s reach as a writer and blogger.
One tool that I look at is Alexaholic (www.alexaholic.com), which is put out by Alexa, one of the oldest measurement tools on the Web. Alexa’s statistics count hits from a Web site over a certain period of time, but it obtains its data only from users who have installed the Alexa toolbar on their browsers. Right away, you can see the problem. Alexa is getting its data from a small pool of Web users, and it has been criticized continually for this issue. That said, most publicly facing programs obtain their data from some sort of software installed on browsers. This is why looking at other methods (such as number of blog readers) is important.
But, Alexaholic (or Alexa, for that matter) can pit your site against others over time, using graphs and charts. One unfortunate aspect of this tool is that if your site is not within the top 100,000, it does not provide any statistics. Most library blogs do not fall in the top 100,000.
Digging Up Crucial Data
Another tool that I have recently come across is Compete (www.compete.com). Compete only counts a hit on a site if the user has installed the Compete toolbar. While Compete is not as well- known as Alexa (and it delivers less valid data), it does provide data for more sites. For example, my blog does not show up on Alexa, but it does give some data, such as monthly unique views and more. Again, for a publicly facing site, where anyone can locate any type of statistical data on any Web site, I rely on Alexa and Compete.
Blog subscription numbers can also be counted from the major Web aggregation tools, such as Google Reader, Bloglines (www.bloglines.com), and Newsgator (www.newsgator.com). Keep in mind that each of these services differs in its reach. The latest figures show Google Reader pulling ahead of Bloglines; Newsgator is in third place.
My portal tools, such as My Yahoo!, also aggregate content, but they do not provide any statistics on the number of subscriptions for each feed. It’s also important to note that with these services, a subscription doesn’t mean that the person behind that subscription has actually read the content. Many users sign up for these services and abandon them later on.
Statistics can be fun but not misleading enough to be useless. Many have tried to measure reach and influence in the past only to be criticized by others who claim the results were skewed by fuzzy math. Every statistical tool has its detractors, and the data- gathering methods can be called into question. That said, it is all we have to work with right now.
Steven M. Cohen is senior librarian at Law Library Management, Inc. in New York. He is the creator of Library Stuff a blog published by Information Today, Inc. His email is stevenmcohen@gmail.com. Send your comments about this column to itletters@infotoday.com.
Copyright Information Today, Inc. Dec 2007
(c) 2007 Information Today. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.