[Air-l] Website/weblog word counts

[David Brake]

It just occurred to me one rough way of indicating the degree of  
engagement required to produce a given weblog is to point out the  
number of words you might find on one. I have a couple archived as  
HTML - is there an easy way to count how many words there are in a  
folder full of HTML pages? Has anyone done a study of the number of  
words on a typical weblog? Or in a typical weblog posting? Or of  
differing patterns of increasing or decreasing postings over time in  
a given body of weblogs?

FYI Apparently the average weblog comment is 63 words long according to
G. Mishne and N. Glance (2006) Leave a Reply: An Analysis of Weblog  
Comments in WWW2006 http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gilad/pubs/www2006- 
blogcomments.pdf

I just did a couple of manual word counts and one of my interviewees'  
weblogs varied between c 600 words one month to peak at over 11,000  
words in each of two different months.
---
David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London  
School of Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ 
mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/  
(personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ 
dealingwithemail/>
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