I admire the fact that Walt Crawford doesn't miss very much (with one trivial exception with respect to me, but I'm not going into that here as it's covered in the "Following Up" section of Cites & Insights 5:7). I'm not surprised that he noticed my comments on his investigation of the biblioblogosphere (the first and only time I hope to use this tongue-twister of a term), and mentioned them in Cites & Insights 5:11 (p. 23 of the pdf file) - although I wasn't sure if he would notice my more candid and less polished comments in the extended version of the post. But he did - I've been busted :)
Many of my blog posts are basically arguments with myself, and they don't lend themselves to easy summaries. Because of this, I'd like to clarify a few things which Walt Crawford mentioned while discussing the explodedlibrary's post about his survey.
Walt wondered if it would be overstating my criticisms to call my response to his survey negative. I'm glad that he wasn't certain about that, because I appreciated the survey as much as it made me uncomfortable. As I mentioned in my post, which perhaps I should have emphasized more strongly, I found out about some great blogs because of this - whether it was directly from the blogs which Walt mentioned, or ones which other bloggers mentioned in response to Walt's survey. If blogging is something important, particularly if library blogging matters, it is a subject worthy of study and analysis - and Walt's survey was a very good, albeit flawed (as is everything in the blogosphere, particularly in these early days) first step in this direction. I say all of that as a librarian who is looking at the big picture.
At same time, as an individual who happens to be a blogger and is a potential subject of such studies, I admit to feeling a little uncomfortable with the whole thing. It's something I'll probably get used to in time.
I think that both objective and subjective measures have their uses, but personally (not professionally), I am more interested in the subjective and tend to be skeptical of numbers. If other people prefer more objective bibliometric measures, I can understand that. I just hope that they are aware (as I think Walt is) that most objective measures usually contain subjective elements as well.
