Grrr. Jotter does wonderful diaries. They focus on Diary Recommends. They have to, because the picture he is painting is that of the ranked status of a day's, or a week's, diaries.
The problem is not anything that Jotter is doing, but the way that people are interpreting what he is doing. I've been hearing over and over how sad it is that people don't recommend enough, and that too many diarists have no interest in the community, because of how the Diary/Recommend/Comment intersection data are interpreted.
People, it ain't so.
An average diary might get, say, 22 Diary Recommends. On an average day, 160 diaries might pull in 3,520 Diary Recommends. On the same day, 8,900 Tip Jars and other comments collect about 56,000 comment recommends. Notice the slight difference between the figures, depending on which type of recommend we're talking about?
A diarist can reply to 50 or 100 comments in their own diary, recommend widely among those comments, and surf another 50 diaries, strewing Tip Jar and comment recommends with a generous hand, and not have it show up in the intersection data (assuming I'm reading the figures correctly). It doesn't matter to Jotter's figures, because it doesn't make a difference to the diary ranking, except for upping the total number of comments in the diary.
Yes, some diarists are post and run, and contribute very little to the community. Maybe 5%, by my rough count (very rough - I checked individual diarists for comment and recommend data for a couple of hours, and quit when my eyes crossed). The rest vary all over the map, but they averaged 10 additional comments and 40 comment recommends per diarist. Not a picture of users who aren't interested in the community.
/rant over