Now that Kottke.org has become a publicly funded enterprise, he has a responsibility to “edit/write/design/code the site for one year on a full-time basis.” This means that his posts should be frequent, long, and of high quality since he started blogging full time on 2/22/2005. However, a graph of post length over time shows a disturbing fact:

The length and quantity of posts are incredibly low in the month since he went public! On average, every day he writes about 300 words, not counting the numerous links that go on the site. Is 300 words a full time job? Not really. Take a look at this telling histogram:

Kotte.org Posts” />

More than 50% off Kottke.org’s new full time consists of posting virtually nothing! To put this in precise terms, we can construct a 95% confidence interval for the average length of Kottke’s posts. Since n=37 samples, we have approximately a standard normal distribution, which implies the following large-sample confidence interval:

Plugging in the data since he went public, you get the following interval:

95% CI: (69, 322)

In plain terms, we can say with 95% probability that Kottke’s average post-lengths fall in this interval. Or, in other words, it certainly doesn’t look like he’s working on www.kottke.org as a full time job.

Update:

It’s not that I don’t like www.kottke.org as a blog. I was just surprised to see little change about the site when he “went public” and received funding to work on it full time. This is a quantitative measure of exactly how much posting he’s done since then, which bears out my impressions. It’s a great blog, and I’m sure he’s a great guy, but, the posting is sparse!

26 Responses to “Public Blogger: Kottke”

1. praetorian says:

   4/26/2005 at 1:23 pm

   This is a beautifully-illustrated example of how a welfare state breeds laziness. Vote Conservative.

   Reply