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November 5, 2003
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 Part One: A
Special Analysis of Salon Blogs:
This analysis is based on a random sampling of 215 Salon blogs,
representing every tenth blog in the sequence from 0001000 to 0003131,
the highest number assigned to date. In this sample:
- 35% had never been used (i.e. zero posts had been made)
- Of the blogs that had at least one post, 68% had been abandoned
within one month of the first post (i.e. during the 'free' period).
Therefore, in the 16 months since Salon Blogs started (and ignoring
those just started in the last 30 days), only about 300 bloggers (one
in seven of those that applied for a Salon blog) have ponied up after
the first month.
- The number of Salon bloggers still active (at least one post in
the last 30 days) is slightly less
than 200, of which about 50 are new this month. Both numbers are
unchanged from last month.
- If past history continues, only half of this month's new bloggers
will still be blogging a month after they start, and only 10 will still
be blogging a year from now. Someone
needs to take on a project to contact each new Salon blogger, help them
out, make them feel a part of the community, and encourage them to
stick around. Might make your blog really popular, and you
wouldn't have to dig for something to write about. Any volunteers?
- About a hundred Salon blogs get abandoned every month, and a
slightly larger number get started each month and make at least one
post. The drop out rate is largely unseasonal, though it appears
slightly lower in November, March and June than in other months.
- An average of about two bloggers a month leave a 'forwarding
address' to another non-Radio blog site. This rate seems to be
increasing, with TypePad the major beneficiary.
- At least a dozen of the 200-or-so active Salon blogs are 'mirror
sites', where the blogger primarily uses another blogging tool but
maintains, out of loyalty to the Salon community and/or a desire for
greater visibility, their Salon membership, with a copy of their blog
in the Salon domain so that it still appears in the Salon most popular
and recently updated lists.
- Approximately 70% of Salon
Blogs that last more than one month, and the same proportion of active
Salon Blogs, are authored by men. This was a surprising finding
given that a majority of blogs using other tools are authored by women.
Very few (less than 5% of) Salon Bloggers attempt to disguise their
gender, so I believe this number to be accurate. I'll leave it up to
readers to speculate why this is so. But since exactly 70% of the Top
50 Salon Blogs in the rankings (see below) are male-authored, it
appears that in this corner of the blogosphere there is none of the
gender discrimination that seems to be
present elsewhere.
Part
Two: This Month's Ranking of Salon Blogs:
The
following
chart shows (a) in red,
the ranking among Salon Blogs in number of
hits
in the past month (to November 4th) and (b) in black,
the
ranking
among Salon Blogs in number of inbound blogs (per
Technorati ) at November 4th, followed by the number of hits during
the month and the current number of
inbound
blogs. Blogs are listed in order of combined (a) + (b) rank.
Last month's combined rank is shown in brackets.
Active Salon blogs received an aggregate 900,000 hits during the month,
no change
from last month. The
aggregrate number of inbound links to active Salon Blogs rose 3% to
about 2,700.
The Power Law
continues to prevail (the top 50 blogs account for 89% of all inbound
blogs and 92% of the hits of the entire Salon community).
Name and location of each blog's 'owner', when known, is shown below
the blog name. The Salon blog # links to the blog's home page.
Apologies in advance for any errors or omissions. Corrections
gratefully accepted. If you're listed and your location is not, please
drop me a line and tell me where you blog from.
6:49:25 AM 
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© Copyright 2004
Dave Pollard.
Last update:
19/02/2004; 2:56:41 PM. |
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