Note: Here’s one to skip if you don’t care about the statistics of this blog.

B.L Ochman started a post about blog post word lengths that made me curious.

I am of the opinion that blog posts should be short and 99% of mine are well under 300 words. I think anything longer than 300 words is an article, not a blog post

I replied in B.L’s comments that: “Our main blog’s most read entries (and commented on too) by and large are longer than 300 words.”

What I didn’t say was that was based on assumptions, not facts. I didn’t really know, so I checked it out by whipping up a little code to cycle through the database, strip the HTML tags and report back the word count for each post. Next month on the 4th of July this blog will turn two years old. As of this writing, from day one until now, here are the actual results:

Total words: 465,126 in 2,048 posts
More than 300 words: 433 [21.1426%]
Average words per post: 227
Max words for a single post: 2,706 on 2005-05-19 10:24:06 (Podcasting Star Wars: Winer vs. Curry)

After reviewing the actual stats, now I have to retract my comments on B.L’s blog. Doh! Sorry B.L. Almost one quarter of the posts made here to date contain more than 300 words. The longest post here (2,706 words) happens to be one of the more commented on posts. The Gmail stuff got a lot of action too, but then a lot of blogs got Gmail invite attention.

Any guesses when this blog will get to one million words? Will it be two more years? One year? We certainly don’t update like Peter Rojas from Engadget (5,000+ posts in a single year, ya think?). I think that guy posts at all hours of the day every day! Congratulations to Mr. Rojas for being so prolific.

I’d be happy to have half of his output over the next year … in which case means we’d be closing in on one million words around Christmas 2006. About the time Longhorn should be coming out. Hmm …

• A couple Gmail invites left - Make Me Laugh Contest
• How to add Sphere It function based on number of words in post
• Blog mortality: The Blogging Iceberg
• Engadget expanding, adding labs starting Oct 15
• First detailed look at Sphere beta
• Gmail quits the invite-only game, sort of