Blog: Pete Loshin

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Conjectures on Blog Categories and Blog Maturity

When I first started blogging here, I had a list of categories that I thought would cover most of my entries. Based entirely on my personal and quirky blog reading experiences, I suspect other bloggers have done the same thing: come up with a bunch of topics they want to write about, and add those to their blog's "categories" list. They probably also write about other stuff at first, things that are interesting to them at the time, and add new categories to cover those ad hoc topics.

I'm thinking on line here, so bear with me.

There are a number of different quantifiable variables here that I'd like to consider:

1. The number of entries in the blog
2. The number of categories to which each blog entry is assigned.
3. The number of categories in the blog. There's more data here:
   • The earliest date on which an entry is linked to each category.
   • The last date on which an entry is linked to each category.
   • The overall number of blog entries linked to each category.

My conjecture here is pretty simple: that the Pareto Principle guides the distribution of most recent posts and categories in which they are posted. In other words, in mature blogs, roughly 80% of all entries will be logged under roughly 20% of the categories. Or, in *other* other words, as time goes on, bloggers tend to focus their writing on a small subset of the topics they originally intended to cover.

I further suspect that as bloggers become more adept at writing, they also tend to be better at distilling the essence of their message--and as a result, multiple-topic postings should decline as the length of time the blog is maintained increases.

Now, if only I could figure out a way to extract that kind of data into a usable data set, I'd be on my way to a possibly cool new piece of information.

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