I have been keeping a google spreadsheet with the growing number of items in blogs@psu.
To sum up: as of 2/24/2009, we have 10,097 blogs, 39,717 entries, and 16,002 pages.
Big numbers. But what do they mean?
There has been a huge increase in the amount of pages. I might attribute this to the English 202 blog pilot, which mostly asks students create pages, as well as the increased use of blogs@psu as a general web publishing tool and portfolio tool. Really this is a sign of the growth of popularity of the professional template set. Every time a professional template set blog is created, three pages are created by default. This semester you see the amount of pages shoot up in a way it did not do this past fall semester (The first semester the pro template set was available). Seems like this template set might have caught on in a way it did not last semester.
Some digging directly with the DB might come up with some more interesting details.
When I look at the numbers I almost think the pages are the through away. I am thrilled to see the number of users, entries, and assets ... the commenting is thrilling and the use of tags appears to be exploding. It all means good things, but I fear there may be some scrutiny coming. At the end of the day this platform could turn into a radical success ... and that is an amazing thing!
For me personally, I see pages as the least interesting feature, probably because it is the least social. Comments, entries, tend to be more a part of of dialog. However, pages seems to be the feature everyone is gravitating towards. In the first two months of 2009 almost twice as many pages were created than all of 2008.
People stick with what they know - a web that is made up of pages.