First, if you haven’t made a habit of reading Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights on a “somewhat-monthly” basis, get crackin’!

Walt takes a look this month at the notion of the one-day wonder (blogs that are extremely short-lived) as it applies to the LIS blogosphere. I’m honored that Walt chose the dmoz listings as his focus group. He compares two different categories of weblogs, those listed under the general LIS Weblogs category and those listed as Personal Weblogs.

Walt looks at how recently each blog has been updated to gauge its “freshness” (my term, not his). The results are interesting, but not altogether surprising.

There are overall very few one-day wonders in the dmoz listings in either category. Blogs being considered for addition to dmoz are usually placed in an unreviewed queue for observation. I’ll come back to them periodically to see if they are alive. If they are, I’ll likely add them. If not, I’ll either leave them in the queue or delete them. This is purely a judgment call on my part, so I usually try to be patient.

Many more of the personal blogs were fresh (about 85% had updated within the past three months) when compared to the general/topical blogs. However, general/topical blogs are more likely to be kept in the directory, even if they are not actively updated.

Why? Archival interest of the subject matter. Also, topical blogs are more likely to be continued after long absences than are personal blogs. I make that observation empirically, not from supposition. I won’t waste your time trying to analyze why this may be so.

Overall, I do very little deleting from dmoz, which clearly skews freshness analysis. If freshness were the goal, than that would be reflected in Walt’s results. But unless there is broken linkage or similar problems, I prefer to add rather than subtract. Part of a “the more, the merrier” mentality, I suppose.