We have a new tea towel in use in our home. Not any tea towel …a stationery-themed one 8^)
In June 2019 I was lucky enough to have met the Pencil Talk Editor in person when he was in the UK and we had a nice stroll through the park. At the time he just visited the British Library’s Writing: Making Your Mark exhibition a few days earlier. Among other nice gifts he also brought me a tea towel from this exhibition. It’s really nice and felt too nice to use, so it was in storage for a while but we started using it now.
The tea towel from the Bristol Library’s exhibition
It looks great. I like that it doesn’t only feature pensbut all sorts of working tools.
It also does a good job at drying plates and cutlery 🙂
I got to know Fruit Sticker Albums from pencil talk and thought of them as a curiosity. Turns out they are more main stream than I though: Yesterday they were in the news…
You might hardly notice them, but some people love fruit stickers 🍏🍌🍉
I just thought I spell this out. Pencil Revolution and Pencil Talk have nearly the same number of posts.
Pencil Blogs – Revolution Talk
If the post frequency of both blogs will remain the same as in the last few weeks then Pencil Revolution will soon overtake Pencil Talk in terms of blog posts published – probably this Summer
As always in this series: if the blog owner(s) contact(s) me and objects I will take this post about their pencil blog(s) offline, so there is a chance that some of these stats posts won’t stay.
To simplify the data collection the cut off point for this blog post was the end of the first quarter 2018.
Welcome to the next post in our Pencil Blog Stats series. This time we’re adding what is probably the second oldest English-language pencil blog into the mix: Pencil Talk.
The other Pencil Talk
The official address is http://www.penciltalk.org/. I am mentioning this because for many years there was also http://www.penciltalk.com, which I think belongs or belonged to a school teacher. At some stage visitors got a warning about malicious code on that web site when trying to load the web site in their browser, but these days you just get a 403 and 404 error.
The Numbers
OK, let’s look at the number of blog posts over time.
The horizontal axis shows time (the more left, the longer ago), the vertical axis shows blog posts (starting with 0 at the bottom, reaching more than 600 blog posts near the top).
Pencil Talk’s first blog post was end of 2005. If we look at the blog posts over time there seem to be five distinct phases.
Phase A – Off to a good Start
Pencil Talk Blog Posts 2006 – 2008 (Different Scale for Vertical Axis)
At the end of 2005 Pencil Talk is off to a good and consistent start. The number of blog posts grows steadily.
Phase B – The Spurt
Pencil Talk Blog Posts 2007 – 2012
Then, in the Summer of 2007, we have the beginning of Pencil Talk’s spurt. We’ll see later that this spurt is matched in strength by the blog we looked at previously, but that the length of Pencil Talk’s spurt, from the Summer of 2007 to the end of 2010 / beginning of 2011 is unmatched.
Phase C – The Slow Down
Pencil Talk Blog Posts 2011 – 2015
Between the beginning of 2011 and Autumn 2014, we have the slow down where new blog posts became more and more scarce.
Phase D – The Big Empty
Pencil Talk Blog Posts 2014 – 2017
The blog was then taken offline in Autumn 2014 and was only put back online two years later. I was running a mirror for a day, but took it offline at the request of Pencil Talk, so access to the Pencil Talk content was only possible via the archive.org web site.
Phase E – A New Hope
Pencil Talk Blog Posts 2016 – 2018
Yay, Pencil Talk is back online. We’re all so happy.
Throw the Talk in the Mix
When comparing Pencil Talk with Pencil Revolution it’s becoming clear how enormous Pencil Talk’s spurt (Phase B) actually was. The gradient is similar to Pencil Revolution’s most productive periods, but it lasted more than three years. During this spurt, in Spring of 2008 Pencil Talk overtook Pencil Revolution in terms of the number of blog posts.
All the blogs so far: Posts over Time for Pencil Revolution and Pencil Talk
Awards, Awards, Awards…
I am happy to announce that
Pencil Revolution deserves the Golden Pencil Case for being the oldest pencil blog and that
Pencil Talk deserves the Golden Pencil for having most posts.
In case you wonder. Both awards are purely virtual. (Bleistift.blog is a free blog without advertising, after all).
Coming soon: How does the word count compare?
As always in this series: if the blog owner contacts me and objects I will take this post about their pencil blog offline, so there is a chance that some of these stats posts won’t stay.
To simplify the data collection the cut off point for this blog post was the end of the first quarter 2018.
