In one of those occasionaly odd instances of synchronicity, on Friday I installed AWstats on my machine so I could look at the access logs for my site a bit more easily, and on Saturday I found this survey of weblogs referred to by The Register. This got me thinking (hey, it doesn't happen that often) about blogging in general, and my blog in particular.
According to the survey:
- 66% of all weblogs haven't been been updated for more than two months.
- Most blogs are only updated every 14 days on average.
- 92% of blogs are created by people under the age of 30.
- The average blog has less than 24 readers.
Seemingly:
'the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life ... blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for youg adults.'
Feh, if I was a teenage girl, I'd find far more interesting things to do with my time than write a blog, but as I'm an over-40 male and therefore only represent 1% of the demographic, I've got nothing better to do than write this stuff. Sad but true.
I can believe that the abandonment rate of blogs is high (especially free hosted ones), but I think the survey is missing something by categorising blogs into just two sets, either one of the very popular sites written by semi-professional or professional writers, or as a medium used only by adolescent teenage girls. There are a significant number of blogs written by people who aren't in the first flush of youth, and who make their living either directly or indirectly from the IT industry. Such people are inherently comfortable with the technology, but are also aware of it's limitations. Most of these people already communicate with each other via direct email or mailing lists, but blogs allow them to share the more trivial parts of their daily lives with each other. Although a blog is far more public, it is also a far less intrusive means of communication than email, in that you can choose to ignore a blog if you wish, but an email demands attention. Such blogs tend to be a blend of factual information based on first-hand experiences, links to other interesting sites and internet oddities, personal diary entries, topped off with a side-salad of opinions. I think that blogs provide an important means of communication for these people, and one that is largely ignored by the pundits who spout off about the blogging 'phenomenon'. Call it my opinion ;-)
I'd consider that this blog falls into the category above, which is why trawling through my Apache stats was interesting. All through September I was getting about 120 hits per day on average, which is more than 10 times what I expected. However, the most popular file by far was my index.rdf file, which suggests my most frequent 'visitors' are various blog aggregation engines. Of the 'real' pages that were visited, the various spoof book covers where by far and away the most popular - so at least I know what sort of content I should concentrate on!
I discovered that if I turned up the wick on my Apache logs I could get even more information out of AWStats. I've only been running with this change for the last two days, but already the results are revealing. So far I've had 45 hits from the Google searchbot, plus hits from 39 other bots. The frequency of visits by the googlebot in particular surprised me. I also did some digging to find out how widely my blog had been linked to, using both the 'link' search on Google, and looking at the blogs that linked to me via http://www.technorati.com. It appears there are less than 10 links into this site from other blogs, with over 50% of visitors coming here directly. Less than 2% come via a search engine. I can only assume that people who have visited have followed links posted on various IRC channels and mailing lists, because I certainly don't appear to be heavily linked to.
This gives lie to one of the growing myths about blogs - that they pollute search engines and obscure 'useful' information. Back in May/June there was a lot of chatter about so-called 'blog clog', and even dire predictions that Google would remove blogs from its indexes. However, as this article in The Guardian correctly predicted, this didn't happen.
The purported mechanism for blog clog is that us sad bloggers spend all our time linking to each other, and Google ranks pages with lots of links more highly, so we all end up shooting up the Google search rankings. However, as Phil Ringnalda perceptively points out, this is hokum. The reason why blogs sometimes appear so high up on a lot of Google searches is because they often discuss things that there is very little other information about. I reran some of the Google queries that had lead people to my blog and sure enough I was in the first 10 results for most of the queries. When you looked at the search terms used, I was near the top because there actually wasn't much information available, and my blog provided one of the few sources. For example, quite a few of the Google searches used the words 'favicon' and 'apache', and sure enough, my blog comes pretty near the top - probably because I actually have some (hopefully useful) information on that very topic.
It appears that Google indexes even low-traffic sites like this one far more frequently than I expected, and as Google only rebuilds its PageRankings monthly, it isn't surprising that a blog may appear close to the top of the listing for topics that don't have wide coverage. In this case the number of links into a page is mostly irrelevant, any page which mentions the search terms more than a few times is liable to score highly.
When people complain about the quality of the search results returned by Google, I suspect they need to take a bit more of the blame on themselves for using bad queries. After all, it is received wisdom that 95% of the web is full of crap, and if that's what you asked for, you shouldn't really be surprised when that is what you get.
