A little while back, Darling32 asked me if I'd be interested in assisting a friend of hers setup a Quilt site.  The result is Kim Gillilan's Sugar Pine Designs.

There's an especially cool Zoom-n-Pan applet embedded on the Home page and associated with the center quilt graphic "It's A Party".  If you click on "It's A Party", the applet will launch (it's loading a large graphic, a little slow, but well worth it).  Once the quilt appears, you can right click to zoom in, left click to zoom out, and use the mouse to pan.  The amazing thing is that if you zoom in close enough, you can actually see the textures of the fabrics and the actual stitching of the artist!

Kim sells her original Patterns and also is available for Gallery commissions.  If interested, use the Contacts page to get in touch with her.

Xanga versus Blogger, a brief update

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I’ve begun a statistical comparison of various characteristics of Xanga and Blogger blogs.  I have been collecting data from recent random Xanga and Blogger blogs posted over various times of the day.  Although I intend to expand my sampling to larger samples soon, I have now collected large enough samples of each category of blog to make some valid statistical comparisons.

One huge consideration and difference, which I mentioned before, is the significant infusion of foreign language blogs into Blogger.  While in my sampling, I encountered no (0%) foreign language blogs in Xanga (yes, some exist, but very few), 20% of all blogs posted to Blogger are non-English.  These blogs were not included in the results below, so I’m in fact only comparing Xanga and Blogger English-language blogs.

My initial findings:

1. There are some undiffering similarities.
2. There are also some real differences.
3. Interpreting the differences is very tricky.

Given 30 random samples of each blog, averages for various measures: 

 1. Similarities:  Comparing the above means by One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) resulted in a determination of no significant statistical differences between Xanga and Blogger with regards to a) the number of words in the typical blog [p=.65], b) the percentage of passive voice sentences in the typical blog [p=.17], or c) the number of graphics employed in a typical blog [p=.87].

2. Differences: Comparing the above means by One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) resulted in a determination of significant statistical differences between Xanga and Blogger with regards to a) the number of characters per word (word length) in the typical blog [p=.00], b) the reading ease of the typical blog (Flesch—lower score signifies harder to understand) [p=.01], and c) the grade level presentation of the typical blog (Flesch-Kincaid, lower score is lesser) [p=.05].

3. What do the differences mean?  On the surface it would appear that Xangans, on the average, write blogs that use shorter words, are easier to read, and are  targeted for a lower grade level!   Blogger blogs appear to be, on the average, more verbose, harder to read, and targeted for a higher grade level. 

That does it.  I’m out of here!  But the truth in blogging may be that ‘harder’ is not always good (thinking is sometimes bad) and ‘higher grade’ is not always a blessing (the greatest truths may be most elementarily stated).   For instance, the following ‘sample blog’ (contrived by me) would register a reading ease of 99.3 (very easy) but a grade level of only 0.5:

Honor thy father and thy mother. 
Thou shall not kill.
Thou shall not steal.

On the other hand the next ‘sample blog’ below, by contrast, would register a reading ease of 44.5 (rather difficult)  and a grade level of 8.9 (above that of standard text):

Respect your parents in all matters appropriately parental.
You are not permitted to engage in homicide.
You are prohibited from engaging in theft.

The best guidelines I’ve found for employing such statistics as Reading Ease and Grade Level are here.

Up next: comparing Xanga ‘Featured Content’ with Xanga ‘random’ blogs and/or comparing Xanga ‘Featured Content’ with Blogger ‘Blogs of Note’.

Also, down the road,  after I’ve collected much larger samples, I intend to perform a content analysis of the blogs and draw comparisons between Xanga and Blogger.  Do Xangans talk more about sex?  Do Bloggers blog more about politics?  One key area where a difference may lie is in the ‘community content’ between these two blogs: if Xanga is indeed a more cohesive community than Blogger, you’d expect to find more Xanga blogs mentioning or referencing each other and more Xanga blogs mentioning or referencing Xanga itself than Blogger blogs doing likewise.