weekly weekly report : still on hiatus
At the beginning of the summer Metroblogging Seattle’s “weekly weekly report” went on holiday. Now that the weather has taken a turn from the autumn, it seems to still be missing in action. The last contact was a postcard indicating that it had taken a position with a travelling circus. Just as I was thinking of sending off a search party, it became clear that textual content-based comparisons might be so last season.
Based on Dan Savage’s regular “slog” postings, it seems that the only important comparison is page count. Based on his past five weeks of data, it seems that the two weeklies are not statistically significantly different.1
(all data from the Stranger’s weblog)
The mean difference (Stranger - Weekly) is 9.6 (95% confidence interval, -16.8 fewer to 36 more pages). Wow. That’s way easier and less soul-killing than reading both weeklies on a Wednesday evening!
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(1) There is some contention w/r/t the Weekly’s page count for the week of 15 September 2005 [slog]. Even with Dan’s suggested adjustment, the difference in page counts is still non-significant. All of this could be blamed on small sample size.
I hope this is relevant.
I don’t regularly read (or haven’t joined, even though I live in Seattle) the Seattle metro blog, because it frequently reads like an advertisement for local events that you could easily read about in any of the local rags.
I started reading the New Orleans blog a year ago, before the disaster, because the voices that were writing were distinctive and reflected their city experience. I don’t get that from the Seattle Metro blog. It’s as if you have all decided that it “must contain certain content” and be personality free, and only mention upcoming events. That’s why I rarely read it. I could easily read the same stuff in The Stranger. If you want people to engage in written discussion, it needs to become more personal.
Just my take on it
Drury
You hoped that was relevant? You certainly didn’t try very hard.
Congratulations on being so cool you read metblog New Orleans a year ago, though.
thanks for your comments.
I really don’t want to turn this into a big internet fight; so I’ll just say that he content and style of any weblog is really dependent on its contributors and their interests. Metroblogging Seattle doesn’t have an editor (or an editorial voice), but my own general preference is for reading (and writing) weblogs that are timely, interesting, and entertaining.
Oh, I do think that my graphs are way better than anything you’ll find in the “local rags”.
Given that both are about 75% ads, since when does the page count difference actually mean anything anyway?