Glog?

Blog is short for a web log. But what if you log blogs. A log blog or blog log or in this sense a blog log blog. Is it a glog? Maybe a Glug? What ever it's called, that is what this is. A blog post logging blog posts and comments. I was curious a few days ago about some of the numbers and percents of my website. And to have something to compare it to, I also logged in three other blogs I read on Blogger: Tara's, This Point In My Life, Emily Fitzgerald's, private, and Chuck and Shelley's, Famous Potatoes. Each is used for it's own unique purpose and brings up some interesting questions.

My blog, Unquestionable Bread, or Unbread for short, was originally made to keep my family and friends posted on what I was doing way out here in Oregon and also to give me something to do. I started around July of 2004. I moved to Blogger in Dec of 2005. Tara's blog is used mainly as a journal of things happening in her life. She started in January 2006. Emily's page is private. She only gave the address to some family and a few select friends. She started hers in August 2006 and uses it to share thoughts and poems as well as to post about some of important things in her life. (If you do want to read up on things going on in her life, Drew, her boyfriend, started a blog on October 20th called Whimsy By E. A. Fabs.) Chuck and Shelley (I apologize right now for every time I might spell it Shelly) use their co-authored blog to keep family and friends apprised to things happening with them in Boise Idaho. They have been keeping up with their blogs since August of 2006 as well.

I decided to look at the number of blog posts and comments each site had with in a year period, Nov '06 through Oct '07. Each site has been blogging since then so they all work fine. I looked at some interesting ratios such as post per month and comments per post and compared those between sites. Eventually I dug a little bit deeper into the comments and observed who was making comments on who's site and how often. I must point out that since Famous Potatoes is co-authored, I have data for the site as a whole as well as posts done by just Chuck (Kaz) and posts just done by Shelley. This way all data can be observed by site or by individual.

The rest of this blog gets very data heavy-ish. I will do my best to have the proper graphs posted and to display the data effectively. If you wish, you can download the Excel document that I made for this investigation.

I went to each website and cataloged how many posts there were each month as well as how many comments each blog post received. I made sure to triple check my work. I must also note at this point that since people can continue to comment on posts well into the future my count is accurate to the date of November 05, 2007. Here is the data that I collected. The table is in a more reduced form (than on the excel sheet):

Site		Year Total	Avg per Month	Comments per Post
Unbread	Posts	69	5.75	1.14
	Comments	79	6.5833
This Point	Posts	14	1.1667	1.57
	Comments	22	1.8333
Emily Blog	Posts	15	1.25	0.47
	Comments	7	0.5833
Famous P	Posts	28	2.3333	2.54
	Comments	71	5.9167
Chuck	Posts	13	1.0833	2.00
	Comments	26	2.1667
Shelley	Posts	15	1.25	3.00
	Comments	45	3.75

The first thing we can make some easy observations about is posts per month. Everyone seems to post around 1 to 1.25 posts per month except me. I have average of 5.75 posts per month. (Note: don't forget that I am looking at individuals and not as sites, so make sure you don't forget that Famous P is a combination of Chuck and Shelley.) In fact, I post more often than Tara, Emily, Chuck, and Shelley put together. I posted 69 times through out that year compared to their total of 57 posts. This obviously shows to things. First, I have way too much time on my hands. Though in reality that isn't completely true. Yes, I do have time on my hands (I mean I have enough time to gather data on 4 blogs for my own curiousity), but during the period when I had the most time free (Jun-Aug) I also had the fewest posts. The real truth to the statement is that everyone else doesn't have time on their hands. During the summer, more people have time off and therefore I spend my time with them rather than posting things on my blog. The second conclusion that can be made is that I have a different attitude towards my blog than others. I feel that I need to update my blog at least every week. Where as everyone else posts when they have the time or when they actually remember they have a blog.

The other part of the data that is interesting to look at is the Comments per Post(CPP). Shelley and Chuck are dominating in that area. I am in second to last, but we must also keep in mind that the site I am second to is a private site which means Emily doesn't get many visitors and therefore would obviously have a lower CPP ratio. How can this drastic difference be explained? (No Shelley, It's not because you kick ass, though it may be a small part of it.)

One quick guess that fails just as quickly is that Famous Potatoes has two authors and therefore would have a higher ratio. But when you look at the individuals you can see that each alone still has more comments per post. So what is it? One simple factor (and a major one) is that my site has so many damn posts. Some of which are pretty short and don't say a whole lot, so why comment. Also, I'm sure most of you don't check your blogs twice daily like I will sometimes do. If you do happen to take the time to hit the comment button, chances are that you will only want to hit it once, even though you may have read 2 or 3 posts. The next explanation I came up with is that Shelley makes a lot of comments on her own site. But this was just a guess. In order to see if this might actually be a factor, I would have to gather more data on the population of comments through out the year.

So that is exactly what I did. I went though and determined who was commenting on everyone else's blog. The tables below have the sites listed at the top and the commenters on the side. Also the percents in the lower table represent the percent of comments on that site that the commenter made. For example, on Unbread, 20.3% of the comments were made by Tara. (This doesn't mean that 20.3% of Tara's comments were on my site. In fact, 66.7% of her comments, within the group of blogs, were on my site.)

	Unbread	This Point	Emily	Famous P	Chuck	Shelley	All Blogs
Alex	7	7	1	22	10	12	37
Tara	16	4	0	4	1	3	24
Emily	5	0	2	0	0	0	7
Chuck	5	0	0	3	2	1	8
Shelley	9	3	0	15	5	10	27
Other	37	8	4	22	8	14	71
Spam	0	0	0	5	0	5	5
All Com.	79	22	7	71	26	45	179

	Unbread	This Point	Emily	Famous P	Chuck	Shelley	All Blogs
Alex	8.9%	31.8%	14.3%	31.0%	38.5%	26.7%	20.7%
Tara	20.3%	18.2%	0.0%	5.6%	3.8%	6.7%	13.5%
Emily	6.3%	0.0%	28.6%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	3.9%
Chuck	6.3%	0.0%	0.0%	4.2%	7.7%	2.2%	4.5%
Shelley	11.4%	13.6%	0.0%	21.1%	19.2%	22.2%	15.1%
Other	46.8%	36.4%	57.1%	31.0%	30.8%	31.1%	39.7%
Spam	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	7.0%	0.0%	11.1%	2.8%

The first thing I noticed from the data is that I comment on other people's blogs a lot. On each of Tara's, Chuck's, Shelley's posts, I comment almost as much, if not more, than the "Other" people do on their site. My comments make-up between 26%-39% of their comment load for each of them. This has been pointed out before on a number of Famous Potatoes posts. (I believe I was made president of the Famous Potatoes Fan Club.) This gives Tara, Chuck, and Shelley a boost for their CPP ratio, especially since I don't seem to be holding as much comment load on my own blog. I comment on my own blog a little less than a third of the amount of time that Shelley comments on Famous Potatoes, though almost as close as she does to herself. So my assumption of Shelley commenting on herself more is true, but probably not much of a factor in why her CPP ratio is so large. Though it does have some validatity in why Famous Potatoes ratio is. Another interesting thing to point out is that Shelley has 5 comments that were Spam. Those shouldn't even really count. Other than "bad" things that made Shelley's numbers so good, we must also ask the best question, and probably one you may have already asked. What is Shelley doing "right"? The answer is in how she uses her blog. Shelley tends to use her site more as a discussion board than I do. This system will tend to increase comments from the same people, because commenters will return more to see what others say and will comment on comments. One other thing I did find surprising is how much Tara comments on my site. Thank you, Tara.

In case you were curious, I will fill you in on what the "Other" tends to consists of for each site. On Unbread, "Other" is mostly my brother followed by Michael and also Jenny. On This Point, "Other" is mainly DJ. On Emily's Blog, "Other" is her Mom. On Famous Potatoes, "Other" is mostly Jamie and Anonymous. I would probably say that Famous Potatoes has the most diverse population of commenters.

I also made some bar graphs to compare Chuck to Shelley. If you want you can take a look.