Why A-W? Because I’m pretty sure I missed some Do point them out so that I can do a “TechCrunch W-Z Statistics” post too

Quick Stats

• Total of 7007 posts….
• …spread over 1079 days, or just under 3 years…
  
• …with a total of 1,977,710 words…
• …at an average of 6.5 posts a day…
• …with 282.2 words a post…
  
• …receiving 228,449 comments…
  
• …from 56,292 unique commentators…
• …with 18,440 outbound links…
  
• …to 4641 sites…
  
• …at an average of 4 links to every site
  

Growth

Looking at Techcrunch’s growth patterns…

Posting Frequency

Posting frequency almost doubled after May 2007, and has been increasing ever since. I believe that hiring more bloggers to be part of TechCrunch resulted in the, uh, “explosion”. Gabe Rivera explained that this(ie going Pro) was one of the reasons TC was given more weight on Techmeme.

Post Size

Although the frequency of posting has gone significantly up, their length remains almost constant (notice the almost flat Black Trendline)

Commenting Growth

The comments increased by quite a bit after Jan 06, but seem pretty constant after that.

Top Links

Here is the list of the most linked to domains from TechCrunch:

Here’s the chart showing the percentage of links to TechCrunch properties (Crunchboard, CrunchBase, TechCrunch, CrunchGear, etc) and others:

Pretty good I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions…

Distribution of links to sites seem to follow a power-law (as most stuff online today seems to). [Note: Power law distribution, in simplified terms, means that a few sites have a lot of links, and a lot of sites have few links]

Note that the tail is pretty much indefinitely long, since I’ve included only the Top 100 sites here…

Posting Frequency Distribution

The posting frequency appears skewed towards the left:

Most days have 1-5 posts, with 2 posts being the most common. 36 days had no posts, and 29 days had more than 20 posts.

Commenting Frequency Distribution

Comments seem to follow a Normalish distribution, skewed towards the left (btw, question to better stats buffs than me – is it really normal if it is skewed?)

Most posts have 5-40 comments. The big pole at the end is not exactly at 100, but it’s because there are 252 posts with more than 100 comments. Large number of outliers, eh?

Links Distribution

The graph looks pretty weird, but it’s how blogs work if you think ’bout it:

Mosts posts have 1-3 links, while there are more posts with 0 links than 10. I think this is pretty normal for most blogs.

Top Commentators

Here’s the list of Top 25 people who have left a comment on TechCrunch:

(Sorry for the lack of URLs – I put in everyone who was found via Google. If you’re here, and want your url, just leave a comment)

Just as how TechCrunch links back to itself the most, Mike is the highest commentator

p.s. which is the correct term to call a person who leaves comments – commentor or commentator?

Trivia

My most favorite section! However, this has been cut short since TechCrunch doesn’t provide the “time” of posting nor has categories or tags (why is that?)

As usual Saturday is really the “day off”, with less posts than even Sunday. Friday, as usual, is “slow news day”

Saturday’s posts are longest, and Wednesday’s are shortest. Let’s wait till Steve Gillmor’s ramblings make Sunday’s posts longer (On a slightly pseudo-serious note, has anyone been able to understand anything Steve Gillmor says?)

Conclusion

So folks, that’s the end of it. I would release the data set (An 180 meg XML file with all the content and comments) for download, but am not sure what Mike and co would feel like. If I get-go from them, then I’ll make a post releasing the files. Till then: Any queries? Leave a comment!

SideNote: College Admissions

Things will be relatively quiet here for a week ‘coz I’m looking into college admissions. You can help too! The college I’m hoping to get into has a history of accepting students with a history of good extra-curricular activities. Now, if I get lotsa links here, my Technorati Rank is goanna improve and put up my chances of sneaking into the college so that I can feel at home with the rest of the geeks there