The noisiest blogs
A while back we added a way to filter the Recently updated blogs page to hide blogs that post frequently. This is useful to hide the noisiest sites and make updates from the quieter ones more noticeable. But are the very busiest blogs too noisy to even feature in the directory? Are they even blogs?
First let’s look at the stats. Here are the blogs that post most frequently, ordered by the average number of posts they publish per day:
| Position | Blog | Average posts per day |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Medical Xpress | 61 |
| 2 | Lifeboat Foundation News Blog | 45 |
| 3 | Biology News | 23 |
| 4= | Tech Xplore | 19 |
| 4= | Stereogum | 19 |
| 6 | ArchDaily | 17 |
| 7 | Earth News | 13 |
| 8 | The Points Guy | 12 |
| 9 | Dezeen | 11 |
| 10= | West Seattle Blog | 10 |
| 10= | 3 Quarks Daily | 10 |
| 10= | Lawyers, Guns & Money | 10 |
| 10= | MacRumors | 10 |
| 10= | Hackaday | 10 |
An average of 61 posts per day (427 per week) is, shall we say, rather chatty! Especially considering that’s the average – some days will be even busier.
As a comparison, here are some well-known blogs selected from a little further down the list:
| Position | Blog | Average posts per day |
|---|---|---|
| 15= | Atlas Obscura | 9 |
| 22= | Conservative Home | 7 |
| 28= | Scripting News | 6 |
| 47= | ianVisits | 3 |
| 47= | Ask a Manager | 3 |
| 47= | Daring Fireball | 3 |
| 71= | kottke.org | 2 |
| 71= | Waxy.org | 2 |
As a further comparison, the median number of posts per day is about 0.07. That’s around two posts per month. Which is fine – there are no rules about how often you should blog! But it illustrates the wide range of posting frequencies: from two posts per month up to around 1,800 per month.
How does this affect ooh.directory? It feels like the most frequently-posting blogs are extreme, and taking up far more attention and resources than the majority. But it’s unclear if this is a problem and, if so, what to do about it.
We could decide that the noisiest blogs are “news sites” instead of blogs and disqualify them. But there are going to be grey areas when deciding this and adjudicating what is or isn’t a blog seems tedious. Medical Xpress, the noisiest, looks like a blog and has an RSS feed, so surely it’s a blog?
We could decide that professional blogs aren’t allowed here, but that’s another set of difficult decisions. Anyone making a living from their blog is “professional” but it would be silly to disqualify kottke.org, for example, on that basis.
We could decide a cut-off point of post-frequency, above which blogs aren’t included. “Anything posting 10 or more times a day is a ‘news site’, and that’s not what this directory is for”. If so, what should that number be?
If you’ve read this far, what do you think? I’m keen to hear thoughts from other people before making any decision. Let me know on Mastodon, Twitter or by email.