Dana said in a comment yesterday that she likes my new digs. I didn’t ask her why, but I feel sure she’ll explain if she feels compelled to do so. I like them, too, and it might be presumptuous of me to say why Dana likes them, but I’m going to give it a stab. It feels like I’m back. I have my own space. I think there was something inhibiting I can’t put my finger on about sharing the former site with Steve. It was never anything he did. It was just that I didn’t feel like the space was mine, even though I had done so much work on it. It felt like it was his, because almost everyone that visited it came there to see him. Everyone who comes here is here to see me. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about me. I guess I was kind of feeling like a guest in my own house. Or, as Rajni so aptly put it, “invisible on [my] own domain.” It was ultimately that comment of Rajni’s that helped me put my finger on it and make the decision to move all my blogs to this other domain that I was reserving for education-related stuff. I’m sooooo glad I did, even though it is turning out to be a lot of work — I have to update links and things like that. It could have been more difficult. MT makes it pretty easy to export and import all your entries. So maybe what Dana likes is the same thing I like — I’m more like myself here. She’s been reading me in my various guises for over four years now — yes, it’s been that long!

It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve felt like my blog was suffering. I blamed it initially on the fact that I was compartmentalizing — I had a Harry Potter blog, an education blog, a classroom blog, and a genealogy blog. Splitting up my interests like that made me wonder if this personal blog wasn’t suffering as a result. Maybe in some ways that’s true, but I think more than anything else, it was the fact that I didn’t feel like I had anything to contribute that anyone would want to read. Perhaps that was because of the huge numbers of people who visited PlanetHuff.com just to read his writing and didn’t even seem to realize I was there. I think I was especially mortified by a female reader of his whom I described here (if you put comments on that entry, don’t be offended that I deleted them — I didn’t want you to get involved in case she read it and went after you for what you said; I appreciate the support).

Finally, I wanted to share two things. First, I have installed a plugin called MT Notifier, which will allow you to subscribe to entries so you know when new comments are posted. I don’t expect that to be used a lot over here, but my students will find it useful for my classroom blog, and perhaps readers of my education blog will find it valuable, too. The second thing I wanted to share is Jonathan Coulton. You may have been one of the early ones on the bandwagon, but I didn’t discover him until he’d been “Wil Wheatoned.” His cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “I Like Big Butts” is absolutely awesome. I love it.

Before I close, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the passing of Rosa Parks. I think Wil Wheaton said it better than I could.

I want to thank you for your feedback about my domain conundrum. Steve and I talked about it, and I think he is most happy to boot me out of here! All kidding aside, I think it would be for the best. As Rajni so aptly put it, I’m feeling “invisible” on my own domain, and that’s not good. HuffEnglish.com belongs only to me, and I feel good about transferring my personal blogs there.

My blog will still be available here for one week, after which time I will set up a redirect script. You may now find Much Madness is Divinest Sense at http://www.huffenglish.com/dana/. Please update your bookmarks and bear with me, as some links may be broken for a while until I get things sorted out.

I have become compartmentalized. Realizing that probably only teachers are interested in my thoughts on education (which is probably sad, but nevertheless true), I have moved those thoughts to an education blog I keep on my other domain, which also houses a blog for my students.

My Harry Potterica goes on the Pensieve, yet another blog, but on the same domain as this one. If I have any Potterish thoughts to share, they go over there.

This domain also houses my genealogy blog.

So I have all my thoughts scattered over five different blogs (!) I am posting less frequently here, and often struggle with what to write, which is a problem I do not have on my other more specialized blogs. I suppose I can see now why people tend to specialize — write only about politics, or in Steve’s case, true crime. On the other hand, being much more general on one blog is good, too.

I don’t want to change my current set-up. I like the fact that people who don’t visit here read my education blog. I like it that Harry Potter fans don’t have to wade through my other crap to get at what they want to read. I’m glad people doing family tree research don’t have to try and figure out where in the hell they just landed when they Google genealogy terms.

What I’m wondering, however, is that if you take away teaching, Harry Potter, and family history — do I have nothing much to say?

Something to think on as I rub my chin thoughtfully.

I was surfing Globe of Blogs, which is something I remember to do about once a year, usually in the summer, when school is out and I have more time. There are a lot of blogs out there. Sometimes a description interested me, and I clicked the link, only to discover the blog was defunct.

Blogcount.com keeps track of blogging statistics, and some of them are fairly interesting. From March 14:

• The number of blogs Technorati tracks doubled every 5 months for the last 20 months. [Useful for planning server purchases, I bet.] If the trend continues (and we don’t know why it should), Technorati should be tracking 15 million blogs by August, 30 million by January.
• Technorati discovers 30-40 thousand blogs daily.

From February 5:

• There are 1 million active MovableType and TypePad users.
• When you combine all the [Six Apart] properties, including LiveJournal, there are 6.5 million registered and 3.5 million active users.

In “The Blogging Geyser,” Perseus reported in April that there were “31.6 million hosted blogs,” which they projected would grow to “53.4 million by year end.” In their own list of caveats, they admit that their survey “does not cover nonhosted blogs” (blogs that exist on their their own servers or domains — like this one). They concluded that LiveJournal, BlogSpot, and Xanga are the leading hosts, while they describe my former host, Diaryland, as a “niche player.” LiveJournal’s figures may be skewed high, because the data included syndicated feeds (this blog has a syndicated LJ feed: Much Madness Log; click to subscribe).

An often cited statistic says that the average blog only lasts six months. If that is true, even if you don’t count my years at a hosted service, I have managed to stand the test of time, as it were. In 2003, in “The Blogging Iceberg,” Perseus reported that there were 4.12 hosted blogs, 66%, or 2.72 million, of which had not been updated in more than two months. Further, 1.09 million blogs had only one entry or only lasted one day (there is a difference between the two, but Perseus did not distinguish). The average staying power of the hosted blog at that time was four months.

I wonder if it is even possible to conduct an accurate survey of the blogosphere. This is what I would like to know:

• How many blogs are out there?
• How many blogs are active, updated with some regularity?
• How long does the average blog really last?
• What do age demographics for bloggers look like?

Also, what about quality? This is even more intangible. I personally don’t like to read chatspeak, and I have issues with LiveJournal, which seems like a very closed community — it is not easy for non-LJ users to comment on LJ blogs (you have to declare yourself anonymous, and some users do not accept anonymous comments) or read locked or “friends only” blogs, for instance. Political blogs are arguably the most popular, but I don’t read any. Do you? Speaking of quality, the TTLB has an ecosystem ranking blogs in evolutionary terms. However, I find that the so-called A-list blogs are often just not that interesting. I have tried reading a few of them to see what the fuss was about, but I just didn’t stay. By the way, I harbor no illusions that this blog is interesting or even mildly entertaining, but I decided long ago that the number of visitors didn’t matter to me, or else I’d write about things that would bring more traffic. Actually, I am sometimes jarred by new readers — not that I don’t welcome you, if you’re new. My first thought is usually why are you here?

So before I went off on a tangent about my own insignificance in the blogosphere, I was wondering about good blogs. How many really good blogs are out there? Do you know of one you think I’d like?

And while I’m asking you questions, dear reader, what is your take on all of this?

Benjamin Disraeli said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”