Blogology Returns! (AKA Blogology V)

   Between 2004 and 2009 I liked to study the statistics of under what conditions one got a lot of comments to an entry. I posted a few entries about this under the heading of "blogology"

   After 2009 I had rather drifted away from the subject. I thought I had found all the answers that I was going to and had better things to do than crunch all these numbers all the time. The big take-away that really did effect my blogging ever since was that entries posted on Sundays appeared to get a fraction of the comments entries posted on weekdays got. Additionally, weekday mornings were clearly a lot better than weekday evenings and Saturday morning was alright though afternoon and evening were bad.

   The methodology I had used actually involved using the "find random livejournal" function, discarding inactive ones based on set criteria, and crunching the numbers from 25 resulting random livejournals.

   I had stored the raw data both on my computer (lost a dozen computer crashes ago) and on geocities, which has also now disappeared without a trace, so now other than a few conclusions I posted on livejournal, the bulk of the data is unfortunately gone.

   One big problem I see now is I think I counted total comments, not unique commenters, so a long conversation with one person could skew results.

   Anyway, more recently I had one specific question I wanted to answer -- I had noticed when I'd post entries every day for awhile (such as the earlier times I was posting pieces of my book), comments appeared to go way down after just a few days -- so the question is is entry-fatigue a thing? Does one get more comments per entry posting less frequently?

   And another question I'd come to vaguely wonder was, is there an optimum length of livejournal entry?

   So I set about once again crunching numbers. In excel (actually OpenOffice Calc) I recorded various details of 100 of my entries, from just prior to the start of the current season of LJ Idol this past February to, entirely coincidentally, immediately after the conclusion of (my involvement in) the previous season of LJ Idol in June 2020 (so the data set doesn't include any LJ Idol entries, which I had intended to exclude anyway).


Surveying the Wasteland: Comments Per Entry
   Some interesting results immediately struck me. First lets look at comments per entry:
2004 - emosnail, comments per entry 5.43
2005 - emosnail, comments per entry, YTD 9.66
2006 - emosnail, comments per entry, YTD 6.91
2007 - emosnail, comments per entry, YTD 6.61 (friends-of 186)
2008 - emo_snal, comments per entry, YTD 6.05 (friends-of 196)
2009 - emo_snal, comments per entry, YTD 19.25 (friends-of 483) (!! I wonder if this was the first year I did LJ Idol)
...
2022 - emo_snal, unique commenters per entry, 100 recent entries, 5.32 (friends-of 871)

   Now I wish I had the data for the intervening years. We absolutely think of livejournal as having died and become a desolate wasteland, but 5.32 is actually not that far off from the numbers from the golden days of livejournal, and when you take into account those were total comments rather than unique commenters it seems at least on par.
   Though one notes there's a correlation and story in the number of friends-of and there's clearly far fewer comments per potential commenter now. I've had to really search for new friends as all my old friends disappeared from the livejournalosphere.

   I'll post additional insights, surprising results and interesting conclusions in subsequent entries! (:

Mostly Unrelated Picture

This didn't fit into my recent Ethiopia entries, but it kind of vaguely relates to obsessing over statistics because it is by far my most viewed photo on flickr (17,605 views right now), after having been posted by my brother to reddit.