Blogging in big bureaucracies round two: the view from the World Bank

Had a useful discussion with the World Bank’s social media team this week, off the back of Tuesday’s post on the struggles that the UN seems to behavingin getting its people blogging (actually, the comments on that post suggest there are lots of UN blogs, but most of them seem to be outside New York).

How, I asked, has the World Bank apparently cracked it, with 300 bloggers on 32 separate blogs?

Jim Rosenberg, head of the team, argued that this all dates back to 2010, and the World Bank’s broader shift to an open access policy – a default position in favour of external publication, which is slowly gaining ground in Oxfam, but seemingly struggling to get much traction in the UN. Jim characterised the basic message as ‘if you’re good enough to talk at a conference, you should be able to write a blog post.’

The team distinguished various kinds of blog – ‘comms blogging’ to broadcast the Bank’s messages; sectoral blogging, targeting particular demographics such as youth, and ‘community of practice’ blogging for peers on themes such as education or governance (where I have a regular slot).

The discussion revealed the ‘blogging culture’ as an emergent phenomenon, unevenly distributed across the Bank. A crucial part in spreading the culture was the success of early adopters such as Shanta Devarajan and Michael Trucano. But there are still ‘dark zones’, often determined by the culture of a particular unit, or the attitude of its boss.

The Bank has tried to put incentives in place, eg including blogging as a performance objective, but it is uphill work. Many academic disciplines still disapprove. Many Bank staff are still risk averse and reluctant to upset people, especially their bosses. As a result, there are few younger bloggers, and the space is dominated by the senior experts (like Shanta). These celebrity bloggers are great advocates for blogging and very hard to rein in, and so created space for bloggers, but their very status is also inadvertently inhibiting new entrants. ‘No-one under 40 blogs at the Bank’, one staffer told me at another meeting – many of them are on short term contracts and don’t want to endanger their chance of a permanent job. Tricky.

Bloggers described a three tier risk management approach, which is very similar to my own:

-          No go areas: so sensitive that blogging on them will just start a debilitating fight. Not worth it.

-          ‘Professional courtesy’: run drafts past issue leads and experts to correct mistakes and avoid fights

-          Let it flow: low risk areas, just go for it.

As to the comparison with the UN, some reckoned  that, while the Bank has a lot of government staff looking over their shoulders, the UN system is even worse and ‘more political’. They also felt that the Bank bloggers are often recognized experts, who are leading figures in global communities of practice, and that status to some extent insulates them from internal pressures.

One of the key differences is that the Bank has worked hard to sort out its comms governance. Who can start an official twitter account? Who can blog? The system needs to have clear, transparent rules to avoid the UNICEF moment of a comms person who thought (wrongly) that the UN banned blogging by staff.

The team clammed up a bit when I raised some comments on the previous post, which argued that the Bank is doing much worse on twitter than it is on blogging. They seem to use twitter in a more top down way, to ‘amplify’ blog content and corporate messages.

What happens when bloggers screw up? The social media team sees part of its remit as rushing to their defence, and have also won some key test case battles (often, they stress, with support of management), heading off attempts to shut down the more edgy bloggers, even when the result is potentially awkward for the Bank.

The culture feels fairly macho – self-confident experts willing to blog, and shrug off any criticisms. So obvious question – how many of the 300 bloggers are women? And (tut tut) they didn’t know – some room for improvement there, I think. Interesting gender stat on twitter – men are twice as likely to tweet; women are three times more likely to take their tweets down.

There has been lots of interest in the UN post, including a nice follow up post from Ian Thorpe of UNDP. Seems like a lot of people are thinking about the challenges of blogging from within institutions.

But what we didn’t get on to, and which I would love to hear from people on, is what comes next. Is there some successor to blogging in the wings? Or will blogging just become a permanent part of the landscape, alongside more traditional channels. If so, I haven’t seen it. Please enlighten me peeps (and tweeps).

Why are there so few bloggers at the UN? A conversation with staff.

I spent a busy few days in New York last week, talking to (well, OK, mainly talking at) about 200 UN staff at various meetings in UN Women, UNDP and UNICEF. There was a lot of energy in the room (and even outside the room – people at UNDP spilled over into the corridor), and plenty of probing viva-like questions and comments.

Which is what I expected, because intellectually, I think the UN is in an enormously productive phase. Just thinking back over recent  posts on this blog, there is UNRISD on Social and Solidarity Economy, UNCTAD on finance-driven globalization, UNDP on the rise of the South, UN Women on women and the justice system and regular appearances by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Taken as a whole, this output is innovative and important, both challenging received wisdom and coming up with some of the new ideas and alternatives we so desperately need.

So where are the UN’s bloggers? UN staff certainly read blogs (including this one, I think a lot of people came along just to see what a blogaholic looks like in the flesh). But they hardly ever write them – the only one I regularly read is Ian Thorpe’s excellent ‘KM on a Dollar a Day’ (the KM is Knowledge Management), but that is so unbranded I’m not even sure the UN knows he’s doing it. The only official UN blog that comes up on a quick search is aimed at the general public – photos etc – not much there for wonks.

In contrast, I’m speaking at the World Bank tomorrow and suggested a chat to a few of its bloggers. Tricky they said – there’s 300 of them. Why the enormous difference? Is this about a greater degree of overall confidence and agency among Bank staff, or the institutional and political constraints operating in both institutions, or a mix of the two?

You want me to blog? Must I?

This awoke painful memories of a ‘bloggers’ breakfast‘ between CGD and Oxfam America last year. As we went round the table, CGD researchers raved about how much they enjoyed blogging, the to and fro of debate, the interaction etc. The Oxfamistas came over all Eeyore and said how anxious they felt about bloggin in case they make mistakes or get the organization (or themselves) into trouble. (To be fair, Oxfam America blogs have come a long way since then, including hiring Jennifer Lentfer of How Matters).

The UN staff seem to be in an even more extreme version of that defensive crouch, so worried about going wrong that they don’t even try. One person in a comms team even claimed that blogging is actually prohibited in the UN, only to be told that no, social media was an official priority (they’re doing better on twitter – UNICEF has 1.8m followers). And there’s plenty of would-be bloggers around – when I asked how many wrote private blogs, 4 out of 50 UNICEF people raised their hands.

So (assuming there isn’t some secret management conspiracy to stifle would-be bloggers), how could the UN start blogging, they asked? A few ideas:

Blogging only works if you move ‘from permission to forgiveness’, as the management cliché has it. But in a large institution with a reputation to protect, you can’t just let anyone start blogging under your logo – they need to earn it. How to marry risk management and the freedom and speed needed to blog? A probation period is a good compromise – for the first six months of this blog, I had to get sign off from Oxfam International for every post, then we relaxed a bit. Now if I screw up too often, I know they’ll rein me in, but if I don’t rattle a few Oxfam cages, I know I’m being too bland. There’s a balance to be struck.

Don’t force everyone to blog – if people see it as a chore, the resulting posts are guaranteed to be unreadable.  Why not start with those four private bloggers and get them to kick off the blog?

Give them time: blogs take months to establish, as word of mouth spreads and readers mount up (or not – the market is merciless).

Give them a face: anonymous institutional blogs don’t usually work. Blogs need a personality. If you haven’t got anyone as obsessive as me, try the Global Dashboard model – a stable of bloggers, with an option to sign up the ones you like. That takes the pressure off a bit.

Any more tips?

This should really matter to the UN, in my view. Good research and policy papers don’t disseminate themselves, and the blogosphere is an increasingly important way to get your messages out. By self-censoring in this way, the UN is reducing the impact of some really excellent work. Consider yourselves lobbied.

This is just a subset of a much wider issue – how to attract and retain mavericks/original thinkers in large bureaucratic aid institutions. But my colleague (and uber maverick) Nicholas Colloff has complained about the growing length of these posts, so (see how interactive this is?) I’ll leave that for another time.

Who needs wisdom when you can have data? FP2P 2012 blogstats and most-read posts

Welcome back, Happy New Year to all etc. As everyone else is doing it, I thought I’d repeat last year’s exercise of kicking off the year with a look back at this blog’s stats and highlights for 2012. First the numbers:

Who reads this blog and what do they think of it? Results of reader survey

The indefatigable Sian Jones has crunched the numbers on the impressive 352 responses to last month’s readers’ survey, so I now have a much clearer picture of who reads this blog (or at least that subset of them able and willing to reply to annoying online questionnaires). Here’s the results (and Sian’s powerpoint summary):

First the X-ray of the readership: 

A pretty even gender balance (55% female), mainly young (at least by my standards) – 50% under the age of 34 – and European (58%).

Over a quarter (27%) do not have English as a first language, so I may have to keep an eye on my use of slang or obscure English humour, although a reassuring 89% find the blog easy to understand.

Over two fifths (44%) of the readers work for NGOs (a third of them for Oxfam). Add to them the 19% academics/students and the 15% government/multilaterals and it looks like a pretty specialised development sector audience. On this blog, wonks rule.

Now your thoughts on the blog:

A fair number of glitches using it on mobiles, via RSS feeds etc which the tech guys will take a look at in the impending redesign – many thanks for those tips.

In terms of content, the thing you most like is original articles. I hate you – they’re the most work. Next most popular are ‘links I liked’ signposts to other work and summaries of new research from other organizations (that’s more like it). You’re not that keen on video content (shame, I enjoy digging up random youtube content….). Mixed messages on having more multi-contributor debates.

As for readers’ suggestions, no clear message beyond ‘more of everything’ – I’m thinking of moving from posting every day to every hour. Which rather endorses the reader who wrote “Henry Ford apparently said ‘If I asked the customer what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’. So I am loving reading whatever Duncan writes, and the best suggestion I can make is – a faster horse.” I’m starting to feel like Boxer in Animal Farm…….

As for innovation (which as we all know, is a Good Thing), readers are notably unimpressed by twitter (yesssss), and instead want more content management tools – access to ‘greatest hits’, old posts etc. We’ll get onto it. And I’m glad at least one person said ‘make it printable’ – I always hate it when you can’t print out stuff on the interweb.

And no surprises on who else you read – uberblogger and ABBA hoover Chris Blattman comes top of the list, followed by Owen Barder, narrowly beating the mighty Guardian machine. I do think blogging particularly suits maverick individuals (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?)

Favourite overall comments [and my responses]:

‘I love watching Duncan writhe under the strain of his internal battle with Development jargon.’ [glad you can enjoy my pain, really]

‘The guests can be a bit heavy’ [are you paying attention, guest posters?]

‘He could write about fashion and I bet I would find it interesting.’ [you’ve clearly never met me]

‘I read it every morning with a cup of tea’ [awwwww-sweeeet!]

‘If I’m honest I use it more for a break from doing my PhD….’ [that’s OK, I use it as a break from doing my job too]

‘I know that the fp2p has occasionally come under some criticism for its honesty (for instance the Spectator’s misinterpretation of the swimming pool debate), but it’s the honesty about the inner workings of Oxfam, and the debates that take place and the decisions that get taken about how to work and what to fund that make it so readable. I enjoy interesting links and the book reviews and the guest posts, but these can be found in other places. The honest commentary on the workings of a massive INGO is unique and fascinating.’ [no comment on swimming pool-gate, but will keep trying to air Oxfam's more interesting internal dilemmas, despite the Spectator]

‘I work for a small rural community in South Africa, and use this blog to breathe fresh air about current ideas, debates and cool papers.’ [thanks, you just made my day]

Now I promised free copies of the second edition of From Poverty to Power (due out in October) to the authors of these quotes, but that was before I realized the responses were anonymous. If you want to claim your copy, send a mailing address to dgreen[at]oxfam[dot]org[dot]uk – I’m relying on your natural honesty and the unattractiveness of the prizes to make this work.

My overall impressions? Extremely encouraged and touched by the support, and ‘just keep doing what you’re doing’ tone of most comments. People generally seem to like the tone, the magpie nature of the content etc. So as it doesn’t seem to be broke, I will only make limited attempts to fix it – more on that redesign to follow. But above all, thankyou very much to all the 352 people who took the trouble to respond and to Sian for processing all those comments – really appreciated.

NGOs and blogging on development: Why do we find it so hard?

I went to a fascinating ‘bloggers breakfast’ in Washington last week, hosted by Lawrence MacDonald of CGD and Oxfam’s Paul O’Brien. A bunch of development bloggers from the Center for Global Development, Oxfam America and a few others chewed over a mixture of blogging dilemmas and CGD’s muffins and fruit. V pleasant way to start the day (actually I had started it an hour earlier reading endless Thomas the Tank Engine books (see right) to a delightful three year old by the name of Lawrence – great way to start the day). What emerged?

My over-riding impression was just how much of a struggle blogging is for NGO types: many (not all) NGO bloggers just don’t enjoy the experience. They find it hard to keep to length or strike a suitably conversational tone. But much more problematic is how they feel about the exercise – overwhelmingly anxious. Constrained by feeling they face a conflict between finding their personal blogger’s voice and having to write to what one Oxfamista called ‘the editorial voice’ (I didn’t even know we had one…..). People talked of ‘writing what I think is appropriate from Oxfam’s point of view, and not in my own voice’. ‘I’m just so nervous and afraid of having my true voice out there, so I get really conservative.’ Ouch. Not surprising, then, that so many great bloggers inside Oxfam choose to set up their own personal blogs instead, but I think that’s a shame too, if it means fewer people get to read them.

These difficulties show in the numbers – a lot of NGO blogs really don’t do very well on traffic or on reputation (the ABBAs were dominated by academic blogs – NGOs barely got a mention). So what can we do about this? First distinguish between the different purposes of blogs and manage them differently. Some categories (please add your own refinements) include:

1. Discursive, trying to set or change agendas (Gramsci would have made a great blogger), raise new issues, but feeling free to express doubts (yep we all have them), and not hammer home specific policy demands (what Owen Barder caricatures as ‘flogging not blogging’). I would put FP2P into the (very) discursive category. For these you need to give the blogger license and avoid heavy sign-off processes. If you’re worried, then monitor authors over a probationary period and if they don’t screw up, progressively loosen the reins.

2. Issue specific-policy blogs – Oxfam’s new Global Health Check is doing rather well in this category, getting decent numbers and lots of positive feedback from health officials and other target audiences. In this case the writers should know the no-go areas better than anyone – so set the bloggers free. In this category, doubt and diversity may not work – if you’re trying to persuade health officials, it’s no good having one post saying user fees are terrible, then another saying ‘well, on the other hand….’

3. Witness bearing: one of NGOs’ niches ought to be blogging ‘from the field’ in a way that communicates the reality of life in developing country communities to people who live elsewhere (mainly in rich countries). If these are really crude ‘thank you Oxfam for giving me a new goat’ type blogs, they probably won’t reach many people – nuance and ambiguity is a good thing when trying to describe real life. But some of them can be extraordinarily powerful, like the blogs from Oxfam staffer Mohamed Ali during the Gaza blockade in 2009. Sign-off here should be limited to avoiding risk to staff or partners in country.

There are some inevitable and pretty fundamental tensions. Campaigners are always itching to use blogging in a rather instrumental way, e.g. get everyone blogging on the same issue or directed at the same target, but on some level, that really goes against the nature of blogs. ‘Authenticity is key’ asked one participant, ‘but how do you coopt authenticity?’ No blogger (or indeed sentient human being) agrees with their organization’s ‘line’ all the time.

And there is more to life (and social media) than blogging. Owen Barder usefully described blogs as ‘part of a set of conversations’, including twitter, facebook etc. He sees the particular niche of blogs as setting out arguments, rather than having conversations – twitter is better suited to that. I came back from the US finally accepting that I am going to have to start using twitter for more than the current ‘robo-tweet’ alerts of blogposts.

Overall, I would say that NGOs need to think about the bloggers not the blog. Blogs need human faces and personality, which seems to go against an instinctive corporate urge to suppress ego, promote the Oxfam brand and speak anonymously in ‘the Oxfam voice’. According to in-house blogging guru Eddy Lambert, this doesn’t work: ‘‘We have no evidence that people want to develop relationships with ‘brands’. It’s people, problems and ideas every time. However much we may wish otherwise, we struggle (as do others) when we place our brand at the centre and obsess over style/tone of voice etc.’ 

If you have multiple bloggers on a site , at least follow Global Dashboard’s model of giving prominence to them as individuals, and letting subscribers pick and choose who they want to hear from.

Finally, this has to be fun, not a chore (or it shows). Don’t force people to blog if they hate it. Would-be bloggers need encouragement, mentoring (especially on the first few posts) and, yes, empowerment. NGOs have to shift from ‘permission to forgiveness’ – a big but essential organizational shift (practice makes perfect – I’m getting quite good at asking for forgiveness….). Unless we can make these kinds of changes, I fear NGOs are going to continue to struggle in the blogosphere.

Your thoughts?

Is blogging (or commenting on blogs) a guy thing? And if so, why?

Last week I had an exchange with Tom Murphy, organizer of the ABBAs online poll to find the best aid blogs, on the issue of gender and blogging. Tom’s conclusion from the ABBAs was

‘The contest continued to tilt towards men. I really have little idea as to why. Possibly it has something to do with it being a largely academic field and maybe there are more men in the social sciences that deal with poverty alleviation (I have absolutely no data on hand for this and could be entirely wrong). There could be a gender bias. I am not sure.’

To which I replied ‘NSS (no sxxx Sherlock). A platform designed for people who love the sound of their own voice and think the rest of the world is dying to hear their opinion? Dominated by men? Well who’d have thought it… Even on the comments, I routinely get female colleagues emailing me their comments, rather than posting them. Drives me crazy.’

So I went back to my own blog and looked at some of the numbers. A readers’ survey (a bit old now, I really need to do a new one), actually came up with a 54%/46% split between men and women reading the blog. So very little gender difference on readership (or at least those responding to reader surveys). But skimming back through the last few weeks of comments and discounting comments from me, or people whose gender I could not identify, I got a 70/30 split in favour of men, which rather bears out my comments to Tom.

In terms of who writes (rather than comments on) blogs, there are many outstanding women bloggers, but the overall picture still feels very male. Some possible explanations:

• The snarky/aggressive edge to blogging is more likely to deter women than men (I have had this feedback from would-be commenters worried about being rubbished, but on the other hand, I know lots of women who are great at private snark – is there something about doing it publicly?)
• Men have more time on their hands – blogging with a beer late at night, when women are doing something more useful (you know, quilting and stuff)
• Blogging is actually a massive exercise in time-wasting egotism – women have got better things to do
• Aid and development are male-dominated, and so the blogs just reflect that (a look around Oxfam’s office suggests this isn’t true, but perhaps the blogging side is more dominated by the very male world of economists – Elinor Ostrom was the first woman ever to win of the Nobel economics prize in 2009)
• Blogs written by men (i.e. in this case me) get more male commenters for some reason – choice of topics, tone etc, (but that would seem to be contradicted by the even gender balance of readers).

I triangulated by consulting some top women development bloggers – here are a few thoughts

Claire Melamed
“What I do find very interesting though is that the same is not true of Twitter.  One of the reasons I am such a fan is that women are much more vocal on twitter – not just in development, but also the journalists etc who I follow.  No idea why, since twitter is just as susceptible to snark as blogging – though it does take less time as you’re limited in what you can say, so it’s easier to combine with the 1001 other things that women are often doing at the same time.”

Alanna Shaikh
“I think that from a career perspective, it is far more important for women to be liked than it is for men. It’s the whole men are assertive/women are bitches problem. High-level public communications expose women to the same communications balancing act we also face in everyday life. Add to the mix that that the most engaging blogs aren’t nice, (They’re sharp, even mean. That’s what keeps people coming back. You, Chris, and Tom are exceptions. Think of Tales from the Hood, or Aid Watch) and it is very difficult for a woman to develop a blog that won’t wreck her career and is also worth reading. Now you know why I only post once a month.”

Deborah Brautigam
“There are tons of women bloggers on all sorts of subjects, so it’s not as though we as a group can be found knitting rather than blogging! For development blogs, I think the economics focus explains a lot. From what I can see, development as a field is tilted toward female participation, but development economics still attracts more men. Much less firm on this, but my gut sense is that there is something culturally male about the putting-oneself-out-in-front-of-the-public aspect of it all and being publicly critical — I do get more men than women commenting on my blog too, from what I can see — especially when it’s an issue with a vigorous debate, or a disagreement with something I’ve written.”

So let’s see who’d like to comment…..

A version of this post also appeared on the Huffington Post 

Take the survey; plug the paper – what’s the impact of blogs?

You’ve probably seen it already, and may even have filled it in, but just in case – a bit of collective crowd-asking is taking place in the blogosphere. Please take 5 minutes to fill in this survey on why/how you read development blogs. It should only take 5 minutes (unless, like me, you’re a blogaholic and take ages to fill in the list of blogs you’ve visted over the last week) and will help us bloggers get a better feel for the people we are ranting at talking to.

This seems to be part of a wider outbreak of blog navel-gazing, including this World Bank study of the impact of top 50 economics blogs, which concluded:

‘First, links from blogs cause a striking increase in the number of abstract views and downloads of economics papers. Second, blogging raises the profile of the blogger (and his or her institution) and boosts their reputation above economists with similar publication records. Finally, a blog can transform attitudes about some of the topics it covers.’

Other juicy morsels:

‘A blog post on Chris Blattman or Aid Watch [now defunct] is thus equivalent to an extra 7-9 months of abstract views, and 4-6 months of downloads. The impacts of Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution and Paul Krugman are even larger – equivalent to 3 or more years of regular views, and a download impact equivalent to 8 months to 2 years of regular downloads.’

Wonder if the same applies to development blogs? Think we should start charging for academic product placement?

Is the blogging bubble about to burst?

I’ve been worrying about the viability of blogging recently. Partly it’s finding myself squeezing this kind of thing in before breakfast and wondering if I really ought to get a life (although I’ve always thought work-life balance was over-rated – depends on the work, depends on the life….). But it was also the raised eyebrows (and envious tones) from a few colleagues in other development agencies, whose tone suggested that blogging was some kind of extraordinary self-indulgence that Oxfam should really clamp down on.

At the same time, like everyone else in this corner of the blogosphere, I was shocked when Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi announced that they were closing down the popular Aid Watch blog due to Chinese meal syndrome – they wanted to stop snacking and free up more time for longer research pieces. Interestingly, they also cited the urge to move from talking about aid to talking about development. Is aid-bashing fatigue breaking out? Elsewhere a few political blogs have been closing down in the UK recently, citing the increasing nastiness of the blogosphere and the lack of a business model that can allow people to earn a living from blogging.

So is the blogging bubble about to burst? Am I finally going to have to learn how to use twitter? Or just go back to writing books and 40 page policy papers? Don’t think so and to explain why not, here are some suitably self-justificatory thoughts about the role of blogging on development.

First, there are plenty of benefits to the blogger, and I don’t just mean a license to scrounge review copies of new books. Blogging forces you to read stuff more carefully and come to a view, it provides an immediate (though fairly small) audience for exchanges of daily thoughts and opinions, and you build up an archive of links + virtually every intelligent thought you’ve had (and a few others) for the last 3 years. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the big cheeses in Oxfam take more notice of something on the blog than if I send them the same thought in an email…… Feeding the blogbeast is undoubtedly a pressure, a daily monkey on your back, but in my experience, it’s a creative one.

But enough about me, what’s the wider organizational cost-benefit of having a (part time) blogger on your payroll?

There are some tangible benefits – there’s enough feedback to suggest that some posts get picked up by the media, or influence academics, other NGOs and (occasionally) policy makers. But I think it goes a bit deeper than that kind of direct (and attributable) impact. Blogging has turbocharged a part of the development discussion best described as the ‘ideas space’ – the daily churn of ideas, buzzwords, priorities, spins and slants which serves to accelerate the evolution of the conventional wisdom of the day. Remember variation, selection and amplification – the three elements of evolution? Blogs are probably best at the selection bit, chewing over new ideas, sifting and rejecting, setting agendas. Some go viral (think ‘Bottom Billion’ or Andy Sumner’s paper on where poor people live these days), while most sink rapidly into well-deserved oblivion.

That chatter influences the views of pundits, politicians and aid workers alike. Over eighty years ago, Keynes memorably pointed out  that ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ That’s still true – decision makers often resemble living fossils of the dominant schools of thought at the time when they went to university. But now the thoughts of last week’s bloggers are overlaid on that deeper, more immovable frame of thought. Gramsci would have blogged from prison.

I’m not sure NGOs have sufficiently woken up to the increased importance of the ideas space. Look at the wonky end of the developmental blogosphere and they are noticeable by their absence. Are we clinging too much to policy paper land, albeit with added press work? NGO blogs tend to be unengaging – either gushing or leaden. Or anonymously corporate – the best-read blogs have a face and a personality, and institutional blogs, whether from thinktanks or NGOs can be pretty dull affairs.

Given the demands of solo blogging, it may be that the most sustainable option is to assemble a group of faces, rather than an institution or an individual. A View from the Cave reckons CGD has got the right  balance between individual personality and institutional identity. Global Dashboard is another example of an a stable of bloggers that produces enough (too much?) output without killing anyone. Any others?

So although periodic shake-outs are inevitable, blogging has to evolve a bit to become more sustainable, and individual bloggers will always drop out through exhaustion, boredom or life changes, I reckon this particular form of cyber soap box is here to stay. Sorry.

Update: look, I really wasn’t fishing for compliments, (at least not consciously), but thanks anyway…….

Who reads this blog? Two years of blog stats and definitely time for a holiday

Google Analytics is dangerously addictive. You can see who’s visiting your blog, country by country, city by city and in real time. I have to ration myself or I’d be checking it every 5 minutes. Anyway, it turns out that I have now been writing this blog for two years. So here’s the verdict so far:

Number of posts: 445

Number of comments: 1322

Number of spam deleted (penis enlargement, viagra ads etc – let me know if you want me to let them through for your general amusement): 102, 069 (roughly 80 for every genuine comment, how depressing)

Number of visitors: 103, 523 (one per spam)

Average time per page: 3 minutes 16 seconds

Most popular posts:

How much is $700bn? (by miles – thanks for the plug, Huffpo)

Are dogs the real population problem on climate change?

Dambisa Moyo goes stellar – why? Some reviews by fellow Africans and others, including me

The backlash against microfinance

‘Moving Out of Poverty’: Outstanding new mega-study from the World Bank

Haiti Reconstruction: Two cheers (and one big boo) for Paul Collier’s plan

Number of countries and territories: 208 (I didn’t know there were that many)

Main countries by readers (click on the pie chart for %):

And the two remaining countries with no visits? Turkmenistan and Mauritania (what’s up with you guys? - talk to me. If you know someone who lives there, tell them to visit the blog and help me get the set.)

Number of words: 263,000 (I feel tired – that’s a couple of books’ worth)

Which words were those then? Check out the wordle

And for those that missed it, here’s the result of the recent reader’s survey.

With that, and thanks in particular to Eddy Lambert and Richard King for their technical support, I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks. Back week beginning 19 July. See ya.

Who reads this blog? Analysis of the first hundred posts

Google Analytics is a wonderful thing – it means I can see how many people read this blog, and which country and even city they come from (don’t worry, I can’t get your emails). So what does a trawl of the results for the first hundred posts reveal?

Overall the site received over 25,000 visits from about 16,000 people (i.e. a mix of one off and regular visitors), with the average visitor reading two posts, and spending about two minutes on the site (such frenetic lives we lead). 

Top five countries: US just ahead of UK, followed at some distance by Canada, Australia and India. Visitors came from 163 countries in all (at the last count, the world total was 192, I believe, so that’s pretty good)

Five most popular posts: Read More …