[WEB4LIB] E-mail discussion lists and blogs?

[Neatrour, Anna]

This wouldn't give a precise measure of audience, but you could get a sense of how many people are reading your blog's feed and compare it with other blogs of the same type. If you have an account at bloglines, you can see how many people are subscribed to any blog using that service. 
If you were to use a service like feedburner for your blog's feed (http://feedburner.com/fb/a/home), I think you would also be able to get some statistics. This would still only give you numbers on a segment of your audience but might be useful.

-Anna

Anna Neatrour
Coordinator of First-Year Library Instruction
Tisch Library
Tufts University
(617) 627-6207
anna.neatrour at tufts.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Sloan, Bernie
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 5:44 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] E-mail discussion lists and blogs?


There's been some discussion back and forth on this list about using blogs to distribute information rather than posting notes to e-mail discussion lists.

Technical/access issues aside, I have a very basic curiosity-type question for those of you out there who maintain your own blogs. Do you have a way to measure how many people are exposed to the info in your blogs?

I guess what I am getting at is whether there is any hard information that could be used to measure the "audience" that you are reaching. You can get a general idea with e-mail discussion lists, e.g., a posting to Web4Lib theoretically reaches an "audience" of about 3200 people (i.e., the number of Web4Lib subscribers). How do you tell how big your blog "audience" is?

I realize this is probably a naïve, apples-to-ranges comparison. But I'm curious anyway.  :-)

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
Champaign, IL  61820

Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax:   (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu