Its February, So It Means Time To Stop Blogging
Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this February 2nd, 2008 9:44 am
This is the third year I am doing my roughly annual tradition of taking a week with the blog posting on this site put on “mute” (or muzzle) as I will take all my writing to blog via the comment space of other sites. This is the notion of “comment blogging” I found long ago, and something I hope helps to underscore the power and benefit of putting your energy into participating in the blogs of others, of making it an active social process.
If all we did was post on our own, we’d just all be the screaming fanatics on the corner.
So I first did this in 2006 and it served, among many things, to be a good spring board for going to my first Norther Voice Conference in ‘06 Last year in February I hoisted my week of blog abstinence and I always feel energized at the end of said week for having more or less visited many other blog homes, put my feet up in their couch, and had some great conversation. It is a way to give back ot other bloggers. A way to spend time seeing what widgets others user. A chance to discover new bloggers, maybe prune a few dead limbs from the RSS feed tree. All kinds of benefits.
This week will be the third annual week of no blog posting (nothing is stopping me from tweeting!).
The first step is a little database tinkering to see this past year’s leader chart, to see who has the most frequent commenter here (part of the week is returning the favor). The mySQL query I used is:
SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt FROM `wp_comments` WHERE comment_date >= '2007-01-01' AND comment_date < '2008-01-01' GROUP BY comment_author ORDER BY acnt DESC
to get me this year’s honor roll:
Alan 180 DArcy Norman 44 Beth Kanter 44 Scott Leslie 24 Jim 24 Gardner 22 Cheryl 20 Brian 18 Sue Waters 18 PatrickQG 14 Bryan Alexander 12 Stephen Downes 12 Chris L 11 Claudia Ceraso 11 dawn 10
Update Beth Kanter has moved up to a first place tie (she had 24 as “Beth Kanter” and 20 as “Beth”, redoing the query to include email addresses sorted this out. Go Beth!
And not surprising, I am the top barker, but also not surprising, taking first place among everyone else, for the third year is D’Arcy Norman which says a lot about the year round active commenting by someone who gives a lot back to the edu web. You go, D’Arcy, even with that crazy SK2 tripping apostrophe first name!
I will be hoping that coComment is capable of tracking my stuff at http://www.cocomment.com/comments/cogdog - it was flaky earlier I had turned it off in October 2007. And wow, I have had the hardest time re-installing it on Firefox. I ran it twice and it never showed up. My email request to their tech support disappeared into the lost sock drawer. Finally I dug through my list of “Addons” and saw it was sitting there but had never been enabled, something most extensions seem to manage to do after restarting the browser.
So now I am set to go, no more barking here for a week. Let’s see if this code will work:
I’ll see you on the other side of this blog-less week. Now off to comment… where should I dash off to?
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Great idea Allan! I am in a similar mode at the moment now that I am teaching this semester. I’ll be spending quite a bit of time commenting on my students’ blogs at our socal rating site that aggregates it all together. Good luck and if you feel like “dropping into our class” via the blogosphere, stop over to our course site at:
http://engage.tlt.psu.edu/disruptive
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
BTW, sorry I didn’t even drop 10 comments on you this year. How pathetic for all that you give to us!
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Interesting… according to your comment query, you only registered 16 comments at my place in 2007, right behind Cole… good enough for a top 10 finish, barely
February 2nd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Great idea. If I blogged more often then I’d try the same thing.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I owe ya, D’Arcy! I could reel out a bunch of excuses, but I probably put much of my commentary into twitter, flickr, etc.
And your production here dropped off by about 50% compared to the year before but I am not complaining (am I?)/
More commenting in 2008. Bringing it back.
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
CD and D’Arcy … just ran the same query. After my own comments, D’Arcy dropped 30 on me and Alan you left me 10! Thanks to both of you for contributing to my motivation.
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Yikes. I’m a little bit scared of what my global annual comment count might be, especially if counting Flickr or twitter. must be in the thousands… I’ve got to get another hobby or something
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I like this tradition, it is yet another way of marking time on the web (I saw this post and said it is a year already!). I wonder if one day if this will be an actual observed holiday in the future of the web, augmenting the appeal of Groundhog’s Day.
One more thing, does this comment make me 2nd now? I have no hopes of catching D’Arcy for he is a madman, but I might edge out Beth and Scott
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:09 am
great idea. I really need 2 try this myself. unfortunately typepad does not have an auto way to count comments ..
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:13 am
who is the othe beth?
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 am
Ahhh, you are both “Beths”, so now you have zoomed to the top for a tie with D’Arcy! Sometimes you entered “Beth Kanter” or just “Beth” in the name field
I added comment_author_email to the mySQL query to sort this out. If I really was good at queries I could get it to match by email and…
Yep, running your own blog software and database means you have keys to everything, though it can be easy to drive off a curve.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Great idea Alan. A well-earned break to recharge the batteries and to share the conversation … bark with others! I’m going to give it a try as well. Now I need to pick an auspicious date.
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