

Twitter Irony: Blog titles are getting longer - ptrwtts
http://mindovermeta.com/2010/08/twitter-irony-blog-titles-are-getting-longer/
Twitter is prompting bloggers to use increasingly wordy titles, with TechCrunch the biggest offender.
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user24
_Techcrunch_ titles are getting longer, but I don't know if that trend
stretches out to the web at large.

So I did a quick survey of my blog ( <http://www.puremango.co.uk> ) which has
been running for 6 years.

Here is a graph of the results: <http://i.imgur.com/l2iKC.png>

There's a slight upward trend, but I'm certainly not seeing as direct a
correlation as there is on techcrunch (but then they have more data)

So perhaps this is the result of a particular editorial style rather than a
wider trend. Worth investigating though.

If you have a wordpress blog, here's the SQL I used:

    
    
        SELECT post_title, post_date
        FROM `wp_PREFIX_HERE_posts`
        WHERE post_type = "post"
        ORDER BY post_date ASC
    

Then I just took it into excel with the following formula to count words:

    
    
        =LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1;" ";""))+1

~~~
RyanMcGreal
If you're using MySQL, you can add the following:

    
    
        CHAR_LENGTH(post_title) as characters
    

AFAIK most SQL servers have some equivalent of a LEN() function.

 _Edit_ : Better yet, try something like this:

    
    
        SELECT left(post_date, 7) as month,
        ROUND(AVG(CHAR_LENGTH(post_title)), 0) as characters
        FROM `wp_PREFIX_HERE_posts`
        WHERE post_type = "post"
        GROUP BY left(post_date, 7)
        ORDER BY left(post_date, 7)
    

This will provide you an average post title length by month.

 _Edit 2_ : Incidentally, here's a chart of article and blog title lengths for
articles and blog entries on a moderately well-read civic affairs website I
edit: <http://min.us/mvfTrxx>

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shrikant
Simplest explanation (imo): SEO.

~~~
scrrr
Yes, but the implications are very interesting I think. There'll be demand for
new solutions eventually. Both on Search-side and on the micro-blogging front.
What will those solutions be?

~~~
ptrwtts
Get ready for the wave of Viral Tweet Optimizers....

------
pmiller2
I wonder if I'm the only one irked that the Techcrunch graph's vertical scale
was in words and the Mashable graph was scaled in characters. If the goal is
to show a link between longer post titles and Twitter, wouldn't it make sense
to scale them both in characters? As it is, I can't really draw any
conclusions from the Techcrunch graph at all.

Also, it would have been helpful to have a control sample of, say, random
blogs from some of the major blogging services to compare to the other two.

------
frou_dh
(Tenuously related)

It's annoying when the names of most of the books on your Kindle don't fit on
the screen because everyone does that colon thing.

"The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential, in
Business and in Life"

Nice.

