Saturday, 14 June 2008

Ghost blogs

As I trudge through the overflowing sea of academic libary blogs, I've noticed that there are quite a few "ghost blogs" - either they never got off the ground, or they fizzled out a few feet in the air (to mix my Wild West and firework metaphors).

This is quite a pain for content analysis! I need a criterion for assessing whether the blog is "live" still, without chasing up every single author.

Probably I will borrow Walt Crawford's "any posts in the last month?" technique.
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2 comments:

waltc said...

Well, technically, I used "at least one post in two of three months within an active academic period" as my criterion for life. It's not unusual for a library blog to disappear for more than a month in the June-August period or, for that matter, the November-January period (in the U.S. at least).

A blog would even stay on my radar if it had a post in March and one in April but none in May...

I've seen blogs come back to life after extended outages, from five months to a year or more, but it's almost impossible to cope with these blogs...

19 June 2008 at 09:01
BiblioBlogResearcher said...

Thank you for the helpful clarification, Walt!

I appreciate this with so much literature washing around my desk and brain ;)

I agree it's more-or-less impossible to follow them all.

I don't think I'll manage that, but thankfully my scope is so limited and the UK is so small, that I might just pull off a decent snapshot.

20 June 2008 at 07:10

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