Popularity of Librarian Blogs
December 13th, 2004Blake takes a stab at the popularity of librarian blogs, and comes to a few conclusions:
“So, to summarize what I’ve learned so far, The Shifted Librarian is the most poular librarian blog, according to my interpretation of browsing a bunch of sites that attempt to measure popularity. (Since I host The Shifted Librarian I can also say she is the most popular target for spammers as well, probably not the kind of award anyone wants to get!) I think saying that Jenny is most popular is a) an honor and b)correct . It’s an honor because she’s popular in an ubelievably huge and crowded field full of talented people. It’s correct because, well, the lists that rank these kinds of thigs say it’s so. But, c) it’s not entirely accurate, because these lists are rather insular and limited in scope, and they probably miss many good sites. Special niche sites like librarian.net, and LISNews don’t show up here because we are popular in a different way. We have limited appeal to a limited audience and aren’t linked to by the blogosphere because what we write about isn’t very interesting to most people. Even though these numbers are far from perfect, they’re all we have, and they all pretty much agree “Shifty” takes lithe LISBlogoprize for most popular librarian blog. She’s got a great domain name, great posts that appeal to a wide variety of folks, and a great hook.”
It’s funny that I should read this post tonight. For two reasons:
1) I was debating on whether I should comment on an article from Newsweek titled, “The Alpha Bloggers”. I have already done so in the past and stand by what I wrote then. So, consider a mention of this article and a link to my previous post as my commentary. The reason why it relates to Blake’s post is obvious. The fact that LISNews and Librarian.net (as well as a host of other worthy librarian-related blogs - Resourceshelf, Tame the Web, Librarian in Black, etc) do not come up in “The Lists” means nothing to me. They are without a doubt the reason why I am blogging today (as well as a host of other librarian bloggers) and don’t need to be on any top list. If this means anything, they are at the top of my list. I look at my stats daily, but don’t get too hung up over them. They are important for others reasons (wait until January), but the satisfaction that I get from comments, e-mails, and IMs means more to me than any list.
2) Popularity polls: They are a dime a dozen these days. The most popular blog from France. The most popular blog in the field of carpentry. Last week, I mentioned a poll of the most popular librarian blogs. Well, it turns out that I won. While it’s nice to be recognized (although I’m going to assume here that I won because I was the only one of the three nominees who mentioned the award), I still feel that a) There should have been more nominees and b) Polls really don’t measure anything, considering that only 65 votes were cast in our category. Thinking back to my statistics classes, that is a low “n=”.
So, Why the rant? Because I don’t want librarians who want to blog to feel that they have to reach a large audience to be “successful”. Don’t get caught up on statistics. Blog what you feel and not what you want others to read. The letter “A” can stand for something other than Alpha. I went through my aggregator again and I realized that I only subscribe to 1 of the bloggers on the A-list. And she is a rock star, a close colleague, and an Alpha. As my buddy Dick Kaser said to me at Computers in Libraries 2002: “Blog On”.