aggienaut | Blogology V Part 3

   So as I mentioned, a significant reason I wanted to have another look at the statistics of blogology was because it seemed to me when I posted every single day, the number of comments per entry appeared to go way down. So what is the optimum frequency to post?

   The results:

Key takeaways: while the data sets for most of the higher numbers of days-since is so small its clearly effected by individual entry quality, one sees that in general, number of unique commenters does tend to go up the longer it's been since the previous post. In particular it looks like there's a sweet spot on four days since previous entry. Combined with Sunday clearly being the best day, it looks like it's best to post on Wednesday and (four days later on) Sunday therefore. (but again, like I said last post, I think Sunday might be effected by me having only previously posted on Sundays when I couldn't wait to post another day, we'll revisit that stats after I've been posting regularly on Sundays for awhile).

   If one just wanted to maximize comments posting every day is still best as seen on the last column on the far right, but hey we are not just comment harvesting machines. I don't post just to get maximum comments, I post hoping to get maximum input on the things I do post therefore the goal is to maximize the comments per entry not comments in total. If one were to take this information into something soulless like applying it to a business blog or something though I suppose the take away would be to just post as often as possible.

   Also I still really don't understand how Livejournal determines when a post is in "top 25" -- I've received the notification an hour after making a post when it had 13 views and no comments so it's a bit baffling -- but it seems more likely to bestow the honor when it's been longer since last posting.

   And also of course this is possibly effected by the plausible hypothesis that when I'm posting every day I may be making lower quality posts then when I haven't posted for a month and am suddenly inspired to break out of my bloglethargy by something.

Unrelated Picture of the Day

Still to come: a slightly different way of looking at it: "# of posts in week previous to post;" and how entry length effects things. And maybe other stuff.

Also i suppose someone with even basic programming skills could probably make a program to scrape together a massive data set on these things in the blink of an eye.. but ah well that person isn't me.