Starting tonight (Sunday February 8), the light is OFF for CogDogBlog regular posts, the muzzle is self applied for my own traditional of taking a week of not blogging to spend time writing in the comment spaces of other people’s blogs, as I have done in 2006, 2007, and 2008. So no new blog posts here shall appear until after February 15.
Of course, this stretch includes two multi-pronged travel trips, including, ironically, the 2009 Northern Voice Conference. A blogging conference. I will continue to post photos and act blog-like in flickr, plus keeping the twitter spray turned on full blast. I am also toying with using VoiceThread again to blog at Northern Voice like I did last year.
As in past years, I hope to find this invigorating and also to sample some blogs I’ve not read much, but mostly to demonstrate the important of commenting in these days of alleged blog death. And also in tradition, I have run my yearly set of stats to find my top bloggers; this is a MySQL query I run in phpMyAdmin:
SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE comment_date >= ‘2008-01-01’
AND comment_date < ‘2009-01-01’
GROUP BY comment_author
ORDER BY acnt DESC
The returned list (below) gives the names of each commenter and how many times that laid some comment love on my posts. Also the number of rows of the MySQL results indicates the number of different people who submitted comments in the same time span (by adjusting the date strings you can get data for different years)
And thus I give thanks to my top commenters, noting for the first time that D’Arcy Norman is not at the top!
- Alan Levine aka CogDog 199
- Jim (Groom) 36
- D’Arcy Norman 31
- Stephen Downes 29
- Gardner (Campbell) 23
- Scott Leslie 22
- Chris L 20
- John Larkin 19
- Sue Waters 16
- Cole (Camplese) 14
- Brian (Lamb) 13
- Dean Shareski 13
- Laura 12
- Beth Kanter 12
- Harriet 11
- David 11
- Dave Ferguson 11
- Sean FitzGerald 11
- Tom 10
- Jen 10
- pumpkin 9
- Pat 9
- James Farmer 8
- Kate Foy 8
- Devon 8
In addition, I have started compiling in Google Sheets the running totals of these stats, plus the total number of people commenting each year, and total blog posts, which is charted as:
So on its own, I am seeing an increasing number of comments each year in a direction the stock market ought to consider moving. This is parallel with an increase in the number of people leaving me comments, so on average, each person is leaving about 2.5 comments (love that half a comment!). A noticeable change form last year was a sharp drop off in the numbers of comments from the top commenters, less than half. Is that Social Network Fatigue?
Lastly, to track my comments, I have re-enabled coComment to try and track my comments, which are logged at http://www.cocomment.com/comments/cogdog with most recent activity dribbled out below:
(note: coComment is one of the many web sites that have bitten the dust)
I’ll hopefully blog you from the other side!
Featured Image:
He’ll eat you…if he can get the muzzle off first, of course. flickr photo by This Year’s Love shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
This is a good reminder, I’m often terrible at leaving comments even when I genuinely enjoy a good blog post. I think scanning posts in feed readers contributes to the problem – on one hand I read much more than I would without the feed reader, on the other hand, the extra steps to comment often don’t happen when I’m in “catch up mode”. I do often comment on articles I share in Google though – does that count? 🙂
Fleep Tuque’s latest blog post…Metanomics Monday: Teens in Virtual Worlds
I really like that you do this! I really enjoy reading your posts, but often the conversation is a little more fun. Thanks for the reminder (and for modeling good behavior) that participation is a two way street! And I just logged my first comment in the quest to defeat both Groom and Norman for top annual commenter!
Cole’s latest blog post…Our Boom De Yada
@Fleep- Everything counts! I do most of my reading in a reader too; if you use Google Reader, I highy recommend the Firefox Greasemonkey GPE script- this allows you to view the original posts within the reader, making it easier to add comments since you never leave the reader.
@Cole- First place is ripe for picking 😉 And how funny, you are committing February to blogging more (one post per day is admirable) and I pledge to do less 😉
I _KNEW_ The Reverend was gunning for me. First, he takes my #1 Commenter spot on CogDogBlog… What’s next?
D’Arcy Norman’s latest blog post…sponsor me in the ride to conquer cancer
@D’Arcy You’re SOUL!
@Cole Bring it on!
@Dog I do love this tradition oo, it almost marks the time of year for me, and I would join you if I wasn’t so sickly obsessed like a dirty crack baby.
Jim’s latest blog post…How not to monetize WPMu
And here’s another comment just to give me a quick leg up on D’Arcy and Cole.
Jim’s latest blog post…How not to monetize WPMu
Dammit, Jim! You’re NOT going to keep the top spot for long.
D’Arcy Norman’s latest blog post…sponsor me in the ride to conquer cancer
@D’Arcy Norman: C’mon kids, let’s play nicely.
@Reverend- you know you can stop at any time? right? admit you are powerless?
uh-oh. it only leads to harder stuff…
I can’t shoot as high as Reverend and D’Arcy. But in the interests of getting above the average, here’s an additional hal—
Patrick Murray-John’s latest blog post…Linkage Graphs in UMW Blogs (inspired by Tony Hirst)
ha ha good luck with not posting for a *whole week* .. yes i’m sure you can do it Alan ;-]
michael chalk’s latest blog post…ACE e-learning showcase coming up
I’m confused… how long is your comment blogging extravaganza going to last? You say no new posts until after Feb 15, but then say that your comment blogging fest will cover NV, which is Feb 21 isn’t it? Not that it really matters, of course, but your fans need to know these things!
I won’t lower myself to playing the little blog comment-count increasing game some *other* people here are into…
Which is, of course, a complete lie. I want to move up at least ahead of that Leslie character next year…
@Chris L: At this rate, you are on the way 😉
I was originally thinking of extending the no CDB blogging two weeks to wrap after NV. I don;t know if I can hold out that long. I still plan to try the VoiceThread blogging as an experiment.
I no longer have interest/energy to do live conference blogging. I want to be in the experience there, not as a stenographer. So if I do blog, it is in reflective mode.
oh, man. conference stenographer… remember Merlot 2004? We were dutifully recording the sessions and liveblogging the whole thing. I still shake my head thinking about that… ah, youth…
D’Arcy Norman’s latest blog post…5 Card Photo Stories
I keep trying to run the query on my blog and I get an error. Sigh … I wanted to be able to make you feel as guilty as I do!
Sorry Cole- there is something quirky in my blog that is converting the <=and > signs in my post. Will email you the correct query
Emailed version worked perfectly! Thanks. Shows me how much less popular I am than you and dnorman. Sigh.
Cole’s latest blog post…Doing it Right?