Librarian Blogs and Popularity
Stephen Cohen shares some great thoughts about measuring the popularity of librarian blogs. He speculates that the reason why librarian/information scientist bloggers aren’t popular around the blogosphere is because so many of us reach such a niche audience. Let’s face it: most people probably don’t want to read about librarianship.
His words probably apply to many other bloggers out there, like those writing about astrophysics, high level mathematics, or dogs. Just because we aren’t on the A list doesn’t mean we should stop blogging.
I’m quite happy being on Z list, where there are lots of cool bloggers.
I agree with Stephen’s words. A piece of my blogging philosophy has always been quality over quantity. If I had to choose between having a small audience of readers who really found this blog useful or a large audience who just might not know how to remove my feed from their aggregators, I’ll take the small audience. I’m quite excited by the increase in hits and feed subscribers I’ve noticed in the last year, which implies to me I might be gaining readers. But still, my numbers aren’t large compared to the number of followers some bloggers have. What I enjoy, though, is interacting with my readers. It lets me know what things interest someone and perhaps why s/he reads my blogs. I then tend to look out for those things a bit more in the future and maybe blog about them, especially if they’re related to the topics on this weblog or something I want to note.
December 14th, 2004 at 8:57 am
Z list! Ha ha – cute.
December 14th, 2004 at 10:30 am
I think Sooz is the one who introduced me to the concept of the Z list. It’s great, isn’t it?
And for librarians, it’s especially appropriate because Z is the letter where library and information science materials are classed in the Library of Congress Classification System.