Tis now the very blogging time of night
When posts do churn and the bava breathes out
Edupunk to this world . . .
(Apologies to Shakespeare)
Over the weekend there was an odd glitch with the scrapers. They’re still down until we figure out exactly what’s going on, so unfortunately I might miss some of the blog data from over the weekend.
But it brought up the interesting question of, if I need to test something, when is it lease likely that people will be posting to UMWBlogs. Of course the intuitive guess is “late at night”. But I’ve got data, so let’s use it.
Here’s a table and simple bar chart of how many posts were written when. NB — many posts get aggregated and republished, which means that they show up in this data twice. Alas, I don’t have a good mechanism for tidying up the data there.
Looking at 16877 posts, for you folks who like that kind of stuff.
| 12am – 1am | 631 |
| 1am – 2am | 383 |
| 2am – 3am | 164 |
| 3am – 4am | 77 |
| 4am – 5am | 62 |
| 5am – 6am | 59 |
| 6am – 7am | 118 |
| 7am – 8am | 268 |
| 8am – 9am | 548 |
| 9am – 10am | 812 |
| 10am – 11am | 1066 |
| 11am – 12pm | 1020 |
| 12pm – 1pm | 1026 |
| 1pm – 2pm | 980 |
| 2pm – 3pm | 1267 |
| 3pm – 4pm | 1257 |
| 4pm – 5pm | 1112 |
| 5pm – 6pm | 766 |
| 6pm – 7pm | 677 |
| 7pm – 8pm | 856 |
| 8pm – 9pm | 1014 |
| 9pm – 10pm | 934 |
| 10pm – 11pm | 910 |
| 11pm – 12am | 870 |
Blogging Times chart
I was actually a bit surprised by how late into night people are blogging — I expected it to taper off a little earlier. I’m also curious about the dip right at 5 and 6 pm. Is that just dinner time? If so, it might be interesting that our blogging practices are so closely tied to that social norm.
And it looks like if I’m going to be testing things, I’ll need lots of coffee.
on Mar 23rd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
This is some really interesting stuff. I’m curious, does this include the data from my drupal sites? I know we’re part of the picture in some senses, but I don’t know which sense this data comes out of. I mean, is this part of the RSS cloud, or is it drawn straight from the database(s)?
If we are included, I’d bet that a good portion of the late night blogging comes from my graphic novels class. I have a blog checkpoint set at every Monday morning at 6:00 AM to try and discourage last minute blogging, but it never fails that I see a flurry of posts after 2:00AM.
If we’re not in this dataset, do you have any tools I could use to scrape my sites individually?
on Mar 23rd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
[...] Groom linked to a post by Patrick Murray-John with an interesting summary of the activity on UMWBlogs.org – and I was curious about what activity [...]
on Mar 23rd, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Zach,
Yep…you are indeed included. I made a design choice early on to work only from RSS — not touch the databased at all — partly to be able to draw on anything that has RSS (which is just about everything that matters!)
And yep again–your students are REALLY heavy on the late night blogging: Here’s the data from your graphic novels class
on Mar 23rd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
[...] I posted this morning about the number of posts by hour on UMWBlogs, Jim reposted it, and from there D’Arcy Norman [...]
on Mar 28th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Interesting data! I’m really enamored of the CSS tricks A List Apart gives for graphing and data visualization: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualization/