This Many Readers

I loved seeing this in the sidebar of someone’s weblog. Sure, it definitely has elements of a popularity contest, but it also contributes to that sense of mutual awareness that’s so lacking in weblogs. I have a vague sense of readership by going to the trouble of looking at site logs, but the audience can’t turn around and say “damn, this is a bigger audience than I thought”.
Working on my thesis last year, I considered how presence, impression management, feedback, and common ground all contribute and characterize the general feeling of connectedness (for lack of a better term) created in one-to-many systems like weblogs. Here’s a little one-page pdf showing related examples and design themes. As a framework, I feel like it’s a little fast and loose, but I’ve found it helpful on a lot of stuff I’ve designed since.