Well, it has been an entire month since I asked y'all how long you've been looking at DailyKos. That's right, my original survey was back on January 17. It seems so long ago. I was rather surprised by the results: nearly three quarters of you who bothered to submit to the pain of polling have been looking at DailyKos for a year or more (73 percent of 385 respondents, to be exact). Fifteen percent have been looking for about a year but more than two months. And only three percent had been looking at DailyKos for just the past two months or less. Frankly, I had thought the percentage of newbies would have been slightly higher. But, when you consider that three percent in two months is roughly an annual growth rate of just under 16 percent, that's actually not too bad. Still, I would feel a lot better if there were evidence of a massive shift in the political tectonic plates--evidence such as DailyKos attracting a five to ten percent increase in fresh eyeballs every couple months.
The original poll is available here: DailyKos Poll 01/17/06
Now the skip ....
Of course, these are not scientific polls. It could well be that many newer people don't interact as much until they've got a feel for the neighborhood. Meaning they tend not to interact as much with the available polls. A number of commentators noted the "lurker" phenomenon:
...many people lurk and learn before participating. I read dkos for some time before signing up and many others seem to take that approach.
One commentator wrote that it "would be interesting [to see] a breakdown of User ID start dates and frequency of visits," but such technical legerdemain is simply beyond my humble powers as a mere initiate. Perhaps if the great powers that be take note of our little series of ongoing inquiries, they might flex some of their magic and deign to provide such statistics. Somebody mentioned "those of us with sub-5000 UID's" which I assume means one of the first 5,000 user IDs issued. Just so you know what a total ignoramus I happen to be in these matters, I have no idea what my user ID might be, nor how to learn what it is.
One question that did come up a few times, and which we can clarify here and now is: what do I mean by "look at dailyKos"? Do I mean anyone who stumbles onto these blogs, even if they run screaming and frothing at the mouth into the night? Or do I mean someone who has registered as a user, been granted their UID, actually knows what it is, has received their official dKos secret initiation kit in the plain manila wrapper, and is well on their way along the enlightened path of perpetual bloggerdom? Well, what I mean is anyone who is visiting, using, reading, looking at, interacting with, cheering, jeering, registering for, praying for Divine retribution against, praying for Divine protection of, lurking, smirking, working for, or simply investigating this here website, whereon you are wasting a perfectly good ten or fifteen minutes of your life reading this.
Oh, the first time around, I committed an egregious no-no by including this request:
If you also are curious, please consider recommending this blog so it stays on the board a while and we'll see what we end up with.
I have since learned, by virtue of the exhilaratingly rare act of actually reading some of the FAQs, that you are not supposed to ask people to recommend your diary. The dKos gods were either busy that day, or smiled on my childish curiosity, because I was not zapped with an enraged thunderbolt, nor hurled into the outer darkness, but am still alive and well, and here bothering y'all again to vote in my poll and consider recommending this blo.... Oh, sorry. Yeah, I almost forgot. Can't do that.
Finally, a tip-o-da-hat to Ancient Mariner Thomas Kalinowski for his top-rated comment on my first poll, which I agree is a lot of fun:
Why, back in my day, we didn't have any of these "ratings" or "mojo" or "diaries" or "logins" or "user IDs". You kids today got it too damn soft! Why, back in my day, we didn't even have electrons! We had to chisel our comments in cuneiform onto stone tablets and lug 'em all the way to Berkeley so Kos could morter 'em in place on the blog with our own blood!
And we liked it! We liked it just fine!
Jeesh! Imagine! No electrons! I just have to observe here, that having no electrons, is probably a lot better than having no elections, which appears to be the direction Bush and his Merry Band of Miscreants is taking us.
OK, OK, enough giggles and guffaws for now! On to business!