What I Learnt from a Year of Blogging!

Do have a virtual slice of my blog’s birthday cake.

One year has passed since I made the decision to attempt a spot of blogging. It has been colourful and worthwhile. So has the learning, which is great, for learning is still my goal. I have Michele Martin to thank for all this for it is she who enticed me into taking part in the Comment Challenge in May 2008.


During this past year I published 193 posts on newMiddle-earth Blogspot. According to Google Analytics, people from 73 countries visited Middle-earth in the last month – a total of 1352 visitors. The most visits came from USA (529) followed by New Zealand (342) of which 325 came from Greater Wellington. The actual numbers shown here indicate relative estimated ratios rather than actual visits, since I didn’t collect data on RSS use.

I have 10 loyal followers from countries throughout the world.

I got a lot of help, and by different means, from many of the visitors to Middle-earth. ‘Visitors’ means YOU!

I take this opportunity to thank you for following this blog and for your support.

What have I learnt?

It is difficult to say, even at this stage, precisely what has been the most useful thing learnt. A lot of that learning has been about me, and I don’t mean that in a navel-gazing way. Nevertheless, there are observations that I feel are notable and I’ll list those here.

Google Analytics and PostRank

I was introduced to Google Analytics (GA) and later to PostRank (PR) and found that, as expected, data gathered from GA on the popularity of posts correlates well with ratings gathered from PR. While there are differences, these two data gatherers complement each other. I learnt that the popularity profile of a post created a tail over time and that the fatness and length of that tail bore some relation to the ongoing interest that visitors had for the content of the post.

Blog persona

I came across the Web2.0 application Typealyzer and learnt that posts I’d written had the persona of a thinker. There was a lot of discussion throughout the blogosphere on the worth of Typealyzer.

I found that most who knew about it misunderstood what it was reporting. I learnt they held the erroneous belief that Typealyzer was analysing their personality type rather than the persona of what they wrote and posted on their blog.

Telling a story

I learnt the merit of telling stories in posts and found that among the most popular posts were those that tell stories for they had the longest and fattest tail in their popularity profile. Posts that do this invariably reach a high rating on GA and PR often within a few days.

The example post Blogging, When A Thing Is Worth Doing Badly, which has held its PR rating since January 2009, shows this trend.

Reading Ease

I was introduced to the concept that writing can have a quality known as reading ease according to the Flesch scale. So I researched the use of Flesch Reading Ease in Word. I later analysed the writing of other bloggers who, incidentally had favourably high Flesch ratings and prodigiously popular blog sites.

90:9:1 rule and so-called community

The rather contentious 90:9:1 rule seems to be obeyed quite well on newMiddle-earth Blogspot. From a total of 1352 visitors in the past month, a count of 13 visitors submitting 25 comments closely follows the order expected from the 90:9:1 rule. Other similar periods examined using GA yield comparable ratios.

While this may seem trivia to some, for me it represents confirmation of the difficulty involved in soliciting participation in so-called communities, notably those that are referred to as learning communities. Anyone who has followed my posts on themes to do with communities will perhaps understand that it is not by coincidence that this theme is threaded through my posts from the first month I began blogging.

Who are the commenters?

A significant observation about my commentsphere is that, almost without exception, commenters are also bloggers. The supposition is that people who do not have their own blogs will visit and read rather than participate in discussion. However, it’s also improbable that all visitors who do not leave a comment are not themselves bloggers.

Post topic and content

I found that posts about my commentsphere and the people that are likely to contribute to it, also reached predictable high ratings. This was one of the first observations I made when I set up GA on my blog. I can predict with an unerring accuracy that a post about the commentsphere will soar in its ratings.

Elearning - an exceptional topic

I was delighted to find that posts specifically about elearning, carry substantially high ratings in both GA and PR. A giant among those is The Elearning Apprentice, posted in October 2008, which has a fat tail that pulls a rating matching that of recent also-rans.

Another extraordinary post in terms of its popularity characteristics is Working With Online Learning Communities, which has such an amazingly even visitor rating from day to day, it has not varied significantly since the tail first took shape.


Highly complex

As absorbing as all this gathered data is to me, I am still quite unable to make logical sense of the characteristics of ‘my part’ of the blogosphere. I suspect that it is highly complex and likely to be even more so because of the varied nature of the post topics that I choose to write about. I concede that my range of topics is eclectic enough to cause me a considerable headache if I try to make too much sense of some ratings.

Why am I interested in ratings?

My original intention was to study communities in the blogosphere with the purpose of understanding more about what engages learners. I’ve never lost interest in that study. I’d always hoped that post ratings in GA, PR or other such analytical data gathering tool would provide me with avenues for studying community engagement. They do provide some of these, but the data is far more complex than I first envisaged.

The more I observe and learn about community engagement, the more absorbed I become in it. Communities and their complexity are fascinating things.

An exceptional opportunity

What I find is fascinating about my commentsphere is the huge variety of personalities and the backgrounds of the people who I regularly commune with, either through their comment on my blog or on their own blog. They range from colleagues who, like me are interested in sharing ideas on teaching and learning to business managers, from academics working at faculty in universities to CEOs of companies, from consultants in elearning to school principals.

Within those groups of wonderful people are blog-colleagues who I first met in the blogosphere when on the Comment Challenge in May last year. Among them:

Andrea Hernandez, who has been supportive of me blogging from day one - I wrote a post, about one of her goals for the year which she has adhered to,

Bonnie Kaplan, who reminded me most recently in a comment of the fun we had during the Comment Challenge,

Sue Waters, who sent me a series of emails recently while we collaborated to track down a virus and who was one of the Comment Challenge organisers,

Tony Karrer, who invited me to join the eLearning Learning community to which I now regularly contribute,

Virginia Yonkers, who is one of my most frequent commenters and a great blogging companion,

Kevin Hodgson, who emailed me yesterday to ask if I’d mind hosting a Day In A Sentence on my blog again. It’s an opportunity not to be missed. It’s all about people.

Having Saved the Baby

Having saved the baby, conserved the bathwater and rinsed out the bath, I should get real, and properly address Tony Karrer’s question which was, ‘what did I learn in 2008’.

In May:

I learnt to blog. Here’s the summary.

In doing that, I learnt that there’s a heck-of-a-lot of people out there who (obviously) enjoy reading blogs, but who don’t blog and who don’t comment much. I’ve had that confirmed a few times since then, while studying Google Analytics and AideRSS.

In June:

I learnt that the age-old rivals, training and education, were still as nebulously and controversially defined as ever.

In July:

I got an inkling that a lot of people who visited my blog were very interested in blogging as such. They were interested in the analysis and also the personalities depicted in blogs. My inkling was confirmed by a series of experiments that concluded in August.

In September:

I learnt that people have all sorts of wonderful ideas, models, metaphors and analogies for learning and how it’s done.

Also that month, I gathered more evidence that, in my commentsphere, there were a lot of people with strong ideas about commenting and the written and unwritten rules and regulations about that.

In October:

I learnt that there existed a whole spectrum of what people believed was necessary preparation for getting into elearning.

Coupled with that, in the same month, I found that there was a range of ideas around the blogosphere on the usefulness and effectiveness of commenting as a means for learning.

In November:

I discovered that bloggers in my commentsphere are keenly interested in the analysis of their own writing persona, even if just for fun.

I also had it confirmed what a joy it could be to blog and participate in blogging.

And it is a joy! Good will to all!

Individuality and Self-reliance – is that you?

I was impressed with Mattias Östmar’s response to the questions
I asked him. He left a comment on my post, Thinkers, Scientists or Mechanics and was quick to respond to my interrogating disposition.

Mattias’ Typealyzer looks interesting. At first sight, it looks like some sort of Web2.0 gadget. It is. But there has been a lot of research gone in to its design and development.

Mattias is from Sweden. Hear what he has to say about his latest researches into blogs, blog posts, writers and personas, and what he and his team have done. I found them fascinating, especially the potential to investigate networking behaviour.

Learn more from Insights from the blogosphere.

related posts - >> ( 1 )

Thinkers, Scientists or Mechanics

My brain activity while I write this post - according to Typealyzer.

Bloggers are generally categorised as thinkers, scientists or mechanics. That’s the conclusion I might have come up with when I decided to find out more about how Typealyzer categorises blog sites listed in my RSS Reader.

Michele Martin, Stephen Downes, Amy Gahran, and others wrote posts on the latest Web2.0 download for performing a Myers-Briggs analysis from a blog address. Stephen declared (I think with tongue in cheek), “The fact that my site turns out to be INTJ - exactly as I test consistently on the Myers-Briggs tests - is coincidence. Right?”

Data validity:

The inference is that data from a blog site can be used to determine the personality of the writer. Hmmm. This could have implications to do with data validity, if a blog site was used to categorise the person who writes posts on it.

I decided to do a bit more exploring. What I found gave me food for thought. By the way, the Typealyzer put my blog site in “The Thinkers” category. The picture above is supposed to be my brain activity while I write this post.

Anyone who has visited my blog and inspected my blog roll will be familiar with some of the bloggers whose names I list here. Yes. You’ve probably already worked out what I did.

Site analysis:

I went through the list of blog sites in my RSS Reader. I took each site and pasted its address into Typealyzer. It didn’t take long. A few sites incurred errors for one reason or another and couldn’t yield any data. There were other sites I visit less often that I left out of this study.

Apart from Mathew Needleman, whose site yielded “ISTJ The Duty Fulfillers”, here are the sites listed according to the names of the bloggers associated with them. I have deliberately listed their names in some sort of random order.

Admittedly, this analysis is entirely anecdotal. The sites were certainly not chosen at random for they are all selected from my RSS Reader.

What could it all mean?

I mused over the results. The most prevalent sites were the INTJ and INTP types. Of all the least likely personality types I’d meet in a crowd of 100 people, the INTJ and INTP would be among them (according to Myers-Briggs USA inferential statistics). In fact, together they would represent just over 5%. That’s 5 people, in a room of a random sample of 100!

I also wondered about the sheer lack of IS types other than the mechanics who seemed to be almost as prevalent as those in the two other groups. If they'd followed statistics, however, the mechanics should have been more numerous.

My selection?

I recalled Michele Martin’s posts on homophily and wondered if it was something to do with my choice of blog sites. Have I been unconsciously selecting blog sites according to their 'personality'?

Or is Typealyzer not really doing a valid analysis? Stephen Downes’ and Michele Martin’s evidence, in support of Typealyzer’s accuracy, seems compellingly convincing. Using USA inferential statistics, their claimed personality types are among only 2.1% of the population. Yet the group they are in is the largest group listed in my table. There are 13 other group types not listed here because I simply didn't find any more. Where are they all?

All sites in my blog roll are written by bloggers who have an interest in training or education. Could this be a factor, an artefact of how they are selected, that has put them into these exclusive groups?

One last thought. I was introduced to Amy Gahran’s site through Stephen Downes’ post. She found that her site returned “ENTP The Visionaries”. When I entered her site address on Typealyzer, the return was “ESTJ The Guardians”.

I wonder if I was holding my mouth right.

( 2 ) << - related posts

Told You So

Ever thought how useful it would be to be always right? Over time, one has the opportunity to make many mistakes and regrettably, a lesser number of successes. My track record is as chequered as a new weave of tartan.

When I look back at the things that I got right, I feel very humble. Rare though they may be, these are the things that most helped me get to where I am today. I know! Don’t remind me!

Self-esteem

It’s true for us all, though. Sometimes we do get things right – thank goodness. And serendipitous though these occurrences may appear to be, they are very important to our self-esteem.

There have been many occasions when I have looked back smugly on happenings that turned out just the way I’d expected. I may even have spoken to friends and acquaintances or work-mates about how I thought things may turn out and got some opposition to my opinion at the time.

But have you ever noticed how unpopular you can be when, through the passage of time, you are proved right and you crow, “I told you so”?

People’s reactions can be such a put down to a know-it-all who’s right. Even if it’s just the once. The fact is, people rarely want to hear that time honoured assertion.

No win situation

It’s been my experience with this that’s taught me to button up when these superior occasions arise. I find it difficult. Often, my attitude gives the game away, even if I don’t say a word. I get quite petulant. I feel it’s simply not fair - I just can’t win.

Dale Carnegie eloquently explains the social consequences of being proved right and saying so. It’s not exactly how to win friends and influence people - hence the title of his book, I guess.

So how does one cover for this? Is the answer to be always wrong? That could be just as problematic. In any case, the chances of being always wrong are probably similar to the chances of being always right. It’s never as consistent as you might like it to be.

But on the occasions when I just know I’m going to be proved right and I say as much, the words are often out before I have a chance to consider the long-term consequences of my utterances. Short of getting a tonguectomy, what is there that a bear of little brain can do?

Thinking About The Blogosphere

photo by Mike Wood.

I’ve been thinking about the blogosphere lately.

It’s been 22 days since Google Analytics became live on my blog. During that time, 269 visitors have made 376 visits and posted 24 comments. Though I can’t understand all what it’s saying, it prompts me to think about the scores of people who visit my blog every week. To me they have become living beings, not just texts at the foot of posts or numbers in the comment tally.

They have likes and dislikes – off days and on days – opinions that aren’t always aligned with my own – ideas that make me think again about what I said – suggestions that provide answers to some of my questions. They are often friendly and supportive, and rarely rude and disruptive. They can be sullen and not say a word - for days.

How much like the living frame is the presence of a blogger in the blogosphere? What character and what personality does a blogger portray when blogging? If you had never seen a blogger or even a photograph, would you be able to recognise them if you met them in person?

If you felt you knew their personality through blogging would the image of the personality you met be the same as how they come across if you met and spoke with them face to face?

Can you see a smile in a comment (emoticons aside)? Can you tell when a person is frustrated – perhaps with you, when you read their comments? Do you sometimes get the impression that some people shout at you when they comment, while others talk quietly and take you into their confidence? Is it possible to whisper in a comment? Even if others would hear it?

Actors learn quickly that audiences have personalities of their own. The arena is always greater than the sum of its parts. Do the people who make up a blogger's commentsphere portray a character back to the blogger that’s in any way like the personality of an audience? Or are they more like a class of school kids? Are they perhaps like people you meet daily at work or at the bus stop or on the train or at the supermarket or on social occasions?

How much could you trust someone you chatted with and built a relationship with through blogging? Is it possible to build your trust in someone in the blogosphere so that you can rely on them in the future? How much would you trust someone in the blogosphere if you felt you knew them well?

Do you see what I mean when I say I’ve been thinking about the blogosphere lately?

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