200 Post Breakdown.

Ok friends. Lets get mathematical. I decided to dig into the blog as a scientific tool to define our collective friendship. As you will find there is nothing scientific about it. Anyways, enough intro--I'll let the numbers do the talking. Keep in mind these statistics arecomposed from a snapshot of the blog at 200 posts--things have changed since then.

Looking at the aggregate figures, it took us 264 days to reach 200 posts. That's a rate of .76 posts per day. If this were a daily publication with 12 staff members, that's pretty weak. While the honeymoon period (February/March) saw a good flow of over 1 post a day, production in September slowed to a trickle of 1 in every 4.29 days! Now for some really meaningless statistics. The average contribution to the blog is 16.67 posts at 8.3%. That means on average, each person contributes 8.3% of the material. (Please someone rip me down for using these numbers). More meaningful are these: 4 people contributed more than the mean, 1 person is extremely average in their numbers, and to put it like any good conservative would, the top 33% contributed to almost 75% of the blog!

As you can see, Matt K is leading the pack being responsible for more than 1/4 of the posts at 55 total. Way to go Matt K. Lets focus on Matt K, the ideal blogger.

Looking deeper, Matt K's production over the first 7 months of the blog when he was living in Pittsburgh was at close to 7 posts per month--about 30% of the new post activity. Since moving to Japan his personal post rate (PPR) has slowed to 2.67ppm about 23% of the new post activity in the last 3 months. While Matt's production has certainly slowed, it has not been far out of step of the rest of the contributing community. And who can blame him? He's living in Japan now! This probably means he's out doing other more interesting stuff. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that he's drawing 2/3 the comments he was when he was posting at more than twice the rate. This seems counter to the theory that the less you post, the more attention you will drawl. Very interesting...

Check this:At first glance it looks like Matt K. published the post that garnered the most attention in terms of comments received. However, looking closer we can see that two of those comments are 'Post deleted by author", both deleted by Matt K. Surely then Peter holds the superlative of having the most comments on a single post. WRONG. 1x 'Post Deleted by Author' - Andrew. Indeed, there were three posts, all by separate authors who hold the position of most interesting post based on comments received index. Andrew's interesting post found here was about his year with Americorps. Matt K.'s most interesting post is surprising as it was rather short. And Peter's was about books. All three posts fell fairly evenly throughout the life of the blog so no conclusions can be drawn from that. Also of note: Matt Nye's single post received no comments. Did anyone even read it? It came with a picture. It was awesome.

Digging deeper into this idea of comments implying interestingness, we can see who is more interesting than others:
As we can see, while Matt K. maintains a high rate of blog (ROB), his posts attract an average amount of comments. At the other end of the spectrum, Vince has 5 posts, all with comments and more than half receiving multiple comments. The award for talks least says most goes to Vince. The award for talks most says least is Matt Nye. At 88% with 25 total posts, James seems to be the most interesting person on the blog though after writing this sentence he will probably not get another comment ever. To prove this point, take a look at this Linear Regression Analysis:Correcting for outliers, the linear regression line shows a negative correlation between posts and percentage commented on. This means that the more you post, the less your posts will be commented on per post. Ignoring the R value in the graph (as it is being thrown off my the stellar performance of James' posts) there is a fairly strong correlation between these numbers. It can be said that if you post just once, you can expect an 83.18% chance of receiving a comment. For every additional post, you can expect that percentage to fall by 55 basis points. Now. Note the circled point. This is James' comment percentage, rising above the rest. Thank you.

Moving on, we can take a more artistic but less objective approach to the 200 post blog breakdown. 38% of Andrew's posts contained videos--a blog-high--and 3 of them contained more than one video. James has the most awesome posts. Jonah's posts have migrated from video game reviews into movie reviews, both of which are appreciated by the readership. Kirby has never posted. Not once. Yet he's listed as a contributor. Lauren needs to post more because I personally enjoy what she cooks up. Matt only posted once though I've given him credit for two posts. Woops! Matt K. is the strongest power user of the blog, though his activity has fallen since moving to Japan. Collin is not even a contributor yet I've included him here because I saw his name written somewhere once. Melanie talks about Peter a lot in her entries. Nick is below average in posts, but beating the average for comments. Perhaps saying less makes people listen more...Andrew. Peter rarely gets more than one person to comment on his posts. Kinda lame if you ask me. Vince's posts are incredibly potent, summoning 100% of our commenting power.

Finally,

wasitrollingbob: can you make the end result that matt nye is the most productive person on the blog?
wasitrollingbob: BEND THE DATA

In conclusion, Matt Nye receives the award for most productive member of the blog for the first 200 posts. Keep up the good work Matt, you are a role model(is he even going to read this?) and your work is a benchmark for the rest of us to aim for.

Thanks.