The median is the middle value when they’re all lined up in order. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but of your 106 posts, maybe the shortest was 50 words or something, and then there were some in the 60’s and 70’s and up to the 100’s and 200’s and 300’s all the way up to your longest of 1313 words. The middle post that list is 223 words long.

The standard deviation is (roughly) a measure of how far your post lengths are from your average post length. So if it’s high, you write long posts and medium posts and short posts. If it’s low, you write posts that are all of a similar length. There’s a link to the Wikipedia article on the standard deviation from the words “std dev” in the heading of every table if you want to read more.

Thanks Jessawhy, Kevin, Tracy, ECS, Steve, Dave, Devyn, Rusty, danithew, and anyone else I might have missed who had nice things to say. I’m glad you enjoyed my number crunching. Thanks so much for the positive feedback.

I’m actually embarrassed about how little I understand these numbers. I seem to vaguely recall once knowing what means and medians and deviations meant, though I can’t remember when i learned it. I need a statistics for idiots book so that I can understand this stuff.

But there are several qualifiers to consider.

First, I’m sorry that it’s not very clear in this avalanche of tables, but I’m only looking here at posts, not comments. All the numbers of comments stuff is listed by who wrote the post, not who wrote the comments. I have data on who wrote the comments, and I hope to look at that soon and post about it. I expect that a far larger group of people comment regularly than post regularly.

Second, I don’t have any data on page visits to figure out how many people lurk without commenting. Based on how many people comment here and there, prefacing their comments with “I’m going to de-lurk briefly” I think it’s probably quite a bit larger than the number of people who comment. This also matches my own experience. I comment here at ZD fairly regularly, but at the other blogs I read, I mostly just lurk and I hardly ever comment.

Finally, my sample is pretty limited. Sure, it includes the big three (FMH, BCC, and T&S), but it ignores far more blogs than it includes. For example, I didn’t include any of the following group blogs: Blog Segullah, The Cultural Hall, FAIR blog, Feast on the Word Blog, Juvenile Instructor, Mormon Matters, A Motley Vision, Our Thoughts, Sunstone Blog, Tales from the Crib, or Waters of Mormon. And that’s not all of the ones I missed. Plus, all of this doesn’t even consider the even greater number of solo blogs.

So I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number of readers were in the tens of thousands, but my data will likely only show how many people comment in my limited sample. As with the posts, it will probably be a fairly small number of people who write most of the comments. But again, I can’t tell how many people are lurking and reading them.

What it basically says to me is that there are about 50 people that comment a great deal on a lot of blogs, maybe 100 more that occasionally comment, and probably about 500 to 1000 readers that repeatedly log in to multiple different blogs. Not the 10s of thousands of readers that has been alluded to on so many other blogs.

What do you think about readership numbers?

Jacob, you all really do attract gigantic comments at NCT! I’ll be sure to make a note of that one if I have the energy to do something similar to this next year.

AB