U. of Missouri Bars Financial-Aid Offices From Having Lenders on Staff

Thanks for the link to my post – and providing it as an example of a thoughtful post with few comments – I’m sure you had many other choices. Historically, posts at DBL rarely get comments, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps the topics are such that readers (and it does have decent readership) can’t form opinions within moments. That’s why librarian fashion posts get lots of comments. You don’t have to think very hard to come up with a comment. I have always found that interesting about discussion list action. Ask a question about how much your library fines per book per day – and you’ll get 50 responses in an hour. It’s easy to enter the conversation – It’s low threshold. But ask if library fines are effective in encouraging users to think about returning books on time – you’ll get a lot less response. I guess I don’t worry about the number of comments. If what I’m writing has some impact on a few readers and the majority are not interested – that’s Ok for me. When I publish a journal article I’m assuming it won’t get any feedback – and so I don’t think much about it. 

With respect to “like” and “tweet” activity, I think it has a fair amount to do with the author and less to do with the content. If you’ve invested time in building your network and you maintain hundreds of friends, and have lots of followers – and it you invest time in following others, retweeting their stuff, etc. – those folks will get more activity – they have a bigger network from which to pull reactions. Take for example two recent ACRLog posts. One is by me and the other is by Bohyun Kim – a guest blogger. The posts are somewhat related – on the outlook for academic libraries. Both posts are written pretty well – engaging. But Kim’s post has 49 FB likes to 4 for Bell’s post. Bell has far fewer FB friends than Kim. Kim’s post was tweeted 59 times and Bell’s post 12 times. Kim is very active on Twitter. Bell not so much. Kim’s post has 5 comments, Bell’s has just 1 (and it’s barely a comment at that). What are your thoughts on that? Does the discrepancy mean one post is much better than the other? Or does it have more to do with your network?

Bottom line though. It’s just a blog post (or a column – and FTBT columns rarely get a comment) and there’ll be a new one pretty soon. So why bother getting worked up about it at all.

ApartmentRating.com is for the baby boomers generation. DoNotRent.com is becoming more popular and will soon be the place to check before signing a lease. Their review system is flipped. Landlords and property managers want low stars, 5 stars is absolute nightmare.