I'll say (b) (though the absence of a post on the big brouhaha over Hillary's dissing of MoveOn would seem to militate for (e) as a way to nudge you toward your RSS reader).

As for your most- and least-commented-on posts, I think you answered your own questions.

Obama buttlickers have a lot in common with cats.

Don't you have anything important to blog about?

yeah, what about Hillary's big "F.U." to the Democratic base ?

Damn, anon beat me too it.

Was going to say that this graph shows that Obama is an elite liberal who hates America and that HRC is just a common gal who slugs down boiler makers when she isn't baking apple pies to give to unemployed steel workers.

It seems to me that your interest has increased. We're just caught up in rush.

Read the book Stress Analysis of a Strapless Nightgown published sometime in the seventies.

I can tell you right away why catblogging is more popular this year: the problems we face are more dire.

Anyone with a cat knows that if the day is going bad, you just nuzzle up to the kitty, and everything seems better. Lord help us. Where's my cat?

BTW, as a Hillary supporter, I want to apologize to the Obama supporter that got called a "buttlicker" above. I also want to chide the person who characterized Hillary's criticism of MoveOn as an F.U. It wasn't.

As I wrote not 10 minutes ago at FDL:

"Look, BOTH sides need to understand that their candidate CANNOT win in November WITHOUT supporters of the other candidate. And, frankly, if your candidate becomes the nominee, he or she will be forced to throw some pretty big bones to the other side to elicit their cooperation, the more muck you throw now, the bigger the concessions will need to be.

Be a little more tactful and tactical in your presentation of your opinions. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind with venomous attacks anyway."

What's so special about this one?

That was one of my favorite threads (until it went a bit too far). I commented at least twice:

"Your new camera seems to be suffering from severe barrel distortion near the center of the frame."

"It looks like your houseboat is listing. I suggest sending one of the cats to the starboard bow."

I think you should do a poll of how many of your readers actually have cats. As well how many readers versus of friday cat blogs?

I have two cats [and three dogs] but rarely ever post about cats and Im not about to chase them around like papparazzi to get their pics, they already think they own the place =)

But mostly I wonder why anon, above, is fixated on buttlicking and trying to pin his third grade imagination on others. Then again anon probably just reduced the size of the GOP with his elementary school rhetoric.

Thanks Anon.

B.

Just what is the supposed correlation between number of comments and "interest?"

Erratum correction: As well how many readers versus *posters of friday cat blogs?

My bad..

OK, Kevin, you're a techie (at least in a past life). Wouldn't it be cool if each data point on the graph linked to the catbloggging post in question? Well, I think it would be cool, and would simultaneously inspire a certain fraction of your readership to click through and perform their own analysis, or at least bathe in an abundance of feline pulchritude.

I also want to chide the person who characterized Hillary's criticism of MoveOn as an F.U. It wasn't.

chide away. but, whether you believe it or not, she insulted a lot of people with that remark: caucus-states, MoveOn members, the "activist base of the Democratic Party", etc..

Perhaps the days upon which you received more catbloggin comments were days characterized by E.

I want to second B's (implicit) theory on the popularity of #3: Domino looks huge in that picture, and I think it caught a lot of us off guard. She's adorable, of course, but I think we didn't know the, uh, size of the matter until you posted this picture.

Idlemind: I may be anal retentive, but I'm not completely insane. Somebody else will have to undertake that project, I'm afraid.

....now if your cats had flag lapel pins on their collars...

I think the cat video data points are skewing the sample. Remove those and the rest of the sample looks much more similar to the previous year.

I think B is a likely answer, assuming no underlying changes in total visitors or commenting tendencies.

Further, in answering the question of why "interest" in the form of comments changes, you might want to control for trends in the overall number of unique visitors on that day (if "unique visitors" can be measured reasonably).

Changes in comments could be largely driven by changes in total# of visitors - unrelated to the cuteness, news-day-slowness, etc.

But simply dividing (comments/total visitors) might underestimate "interest", since new visitors, in a trend of readership growth, might be less likely to comment than old-timers. (You'd have to assume homogeneous tendency to comment among all visitors).

So you could come up with an "elasticity" measure - the rate of change for commenting given a rate of change for visitors [(% change in comments)/(% change in visitors)].

Then, multiply this elasticity, derived from relevant historical data, by a given rate of change in visitors on a given day, to arrive at an "expected" rate of change of comments. Anything above (or below) this trend would the relevant numbers to be explained by the differences in posts, camera, news-days.

Or, a quick and dirty method might be to just divide comments on friday's cat posts by the total number of comments for that week, to kinda control for visitors and commenting tendencies.

Hmmm. Do you think the data would produce a different result if cat blogging (clogging?)was on another day?

As for me, I like it because it means it's officially Friday and I can get the hell out of my office. Sometimes I start looking for the kitties on Wednesday, hoping against hope I somehow have been transported forward 48 hours and it's really Friday.

You forgot:

F. Cats suck. Dogs rule.

Wait -- have you checked whether number of comments on all post went up recently? Maybe there's nothing different about catblogging comments.

Wait -- have you checked whether number of comments on all post went up recently? Maybe there's nothing different about catblogging comments.

My theory is because your cats are horrendously obese and about the time the posts started going down, you start making sure you shot them at angles where we WOULDN'T see their titanic stomachs because as you said 'you guys are hell on fat cats' or something like that.

If, as Beth suggests, you're going to check your statistics against overall commenting tendencies, which might be an interesting idea, you'll have to correct somehow for those threads that turn into Bot vs. Bot bashfests.

You can't rule out the fact that the quality of the pictures keeps improving. If this blogging gig doesn't work out you have the potential for a great career as a pet portraitist.

Personally I think gloria at 1:40 PM is on to something. When the going gets tough, the tough grab a cat and say "nice kitty."

Your cats have gotten better.

My vote is slow newsday. But I have come to love and appreciate slow newsdays. 9/11/2001? Fast news day. Tidal wave kills thousands? Fast news day. Day where nothing bad happens? Slow news day. It's pretty obvious which is better.

On another note, I am apparently not allowed to post comments unless I come into the blog by crafty methods. What is up with that? I'm mostly a lurker, for crying out loud.

First cat blogging, now blogging and charts about cat blogging. With everything going on this is what Paul pays you for?

F. Let's just says cats are almost never interesting .

The rise of Lolcats & the icanhazcheeseburger blog (which came into existence early in 2007 I believe) is probably responsible.

It's because we readers are bitter about our economic misfortunes, so we cling to our cats

You've put in phrasing in each which asks directly for an opinion or a bet. The polite thing to do is answer.

As to why the uptick. You have more traffic this year than last most likely.

B.

The combination cat/gardening/pro-health (anti-stroke) is clearly a three-pronged winner. Most positive post of the year?

BTW - I ended a small group intro to political blogs with examples that included mention of Friday cat blogging. It was greeted with disbelief, gasps of laughter and , "What was the name of that blog?"

B.

The combination cat/gardening/pro-health (anti-stroke) is clearly a three-pronged winner. Most positive post of the year?

BTW - I ended a small group intro to political blogs with examples that included mention of Friday cat blogging. It was greeted with disbelief, gasps of laughter and , "What was the name of that blog?"

Cleek: Take a look at what Hillary said at the end of her comments: "Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] -- which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."

Find me the F.U. Find it. She says "I don't agree with them." Harsh, huh? As for flooding the caucuses, here is a little tidbit I copied from another thread a few weeks ago. It's not mine, but it's very telling:

"Back in New Hampshire I attended a large fundraiser for the state Democratic Party that all of the candidates spoke at the day after the Iowa Caucus. I was at a Clinton table and though we rolled our eyes and disagreed with some of the things Obama said we politely clapped when he finished talking. When Hillary spoke there were a number of Obama people standing amongst their tables who were raising their arms and "conducting" their tables as they booed Hillary. A few weeks ago at the second part of the TX Caucus all of the delegates elected on primary day gathered for the next round. When Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee a Clinton supporter addressed the crowd, not one or two but NEARLY ALL of Obama's delegates booed her and shouted her down as she spoke not about the primary but about Social Security, poverty and healthcare."

I think the more interesting the pictures the higher the popularity. The most popular one had the most artful photos IMO. Domino is perfect for a B/W shot and Inkblot just seems a natural to contrast bright primary colors with.

ciesel at 4:05 PM is one of those people who sits in front of the TV for hours saying "If I have to spend one more minute watching this crap, I'll scream."

And no, I don't have a life. What's your excuse?

I've just noticed that none of your cats ever appear in your pictures wearing flag pins. Why do you hate America so much?

You've got the ugliest dogs on the planet. There, I've done my part to skew next week's graph.

(My first ever cat-blogging comment. Always cute, but outside my area of "expertise.")

Catblogging is soooo much more interesting than this horribly long campaign.

I love cat blogging Fridays and usually put my two cents in. However, I find Inkblot a more "interesting" cat BECAUSE Domino doesn't photograph well. I have two cats, litter-mates with different fathers, who look nothing alike, except they both have huge green eyes. One is a tabby/white mix who is amazingly photogenic. Her sister, a black cat with some small white markings, including a "locket" , is just as beautiful in the flesh, but takes lousy pictures.

I think the same is true of your two.

(B) is the most likely answer, but it would be better if the graph displayed catblogging comments as a percentage of the average # of comments per post for the same week. My sense is that most of the jump will be explained away by a general increase in activity.

They staggered close, but still missed...

Why? Vote for your explanation of choice in comments:

X. It's a goddamn election! More interest in politics = more page hits = more eyeballs for catblogs = more comments!

As so ably demonstrated by arguments about Hillary and Obama in this post which actually talks about catblogging.

So there should be a close correlation between total page hits and comments.

max
['So you left something out of your graph.']

Kevin, It's the quality of the photos - they've improved. The compositions are definitely getting better.

Are these comments counting as "comments on catblogging"?

Congrats. You've created the new category of meta-catblogging-comment-count. As of now the number of comments about comments about catblogging is about 50, and the number of columns about comments about comments about catblogging is one.

One modest comment: Are you sure you want to do this simple point-to-point linear graph? Can you justify why you didn't do a spline interpolation on the graph, thereby ensuring that the first derivative is the same approaching every point from either direction?

Also, can we look forward to second order meta-catblogging counts, which will chart the number of columns about columns about comments about comments about catblogging?

coda: There was a science fiction story a long time ago about libraries of libraries of libraries etc. Translated to modern parlance, it would be like us creating a list of all the web addresses which keep lists of all the web addresses; then if a bunch of other people did their own comparable lists, somebody would eventually start a list of all of us keeping those lists.

D.

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDOHGODD!!!!!

The chart shows that the number of comments had been coming down steadily during 2007. It was time for a dead cat bounce.

Except to bump the count to two, Bob G beat me to the meta-punch.

I just skimmed over the comments so I don't know if this has been asked or answered already, but have the number of comments made in general been going up recently? If they have, then the trend wouldn't say anything about heightened interest in feline cuteness.

Kevin,

What an impressive graph! It looks like something my spouse would do when he was trying to avoid work around the house.

It is the worst economy since the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs. People are starving in the streets, and your cats look fat and tasty.

If it is not that, then I select B for no particular reason other than you mentioned it, and I have to assume you would know whether or not B is, in fact, true.

My cats are cuter than yours. Way cuter! And someday you will rue the day you first rued putting your scraggly felines on the web.

I have simply not found the proper venue for my cats, but when I do, your cats will be eclipsed.

BTW, how often do you eclipse their claws?

So your first and second finishers offered a news article / issue / topic for discussion. The third offered an opportunity to provide feline weight loss advice for someone else's cat, who should definitely lose weight even though my cat doesn't. Your last place finisher is very cute, but there's nothin' to say but "aw, so cute".

Not sure how well # of comments correlates with popularity though. How many times do you come to work to find comments saying, "Dang, Kevin, that was an awesome post! Great analysis! Can we have more like this one?"

Maybe I should start doing that. :-)

F. The cultural ascension of Domino.

C.

Kevin, thanks for sharing your animals and a bit of your life with us. Your photos are great!

any catblogging where the cats are looking a bit--ahem--portly--does generate more comments than usual. There seem to be people who are just waiting to pounce on the keepers of fat cats. I think immediately after, Kevin posted just head shots and admitted he was irritated by all the "fat cat" comments.

The time series on the number of catblogging comments is not interpretable without the concurrent time series on the total traffic to the general blog. I've heard that traffic at liberal-leaning political blogs went up sharply on jan 4, 2008, and stayed up for at least a couple of months.