One day last weekend, I had nothing to do. I was visiting my old Radio weblog, and started wondering how many others had jumped ship like myself. 98 lines of Ruby later, I had a set of totally useless statistics...

Radio Userland is a blogging tool. Userland are the company that produce it. They also provide (as part of the license-fee for running the software) a hosting service at radio.weblogs.com. Every Radio user (even the ones on a 30 day free trial) are given a usernum taken from a mostly-consecutive pool. The user is then assigned a base URL for their weblog of the form: sprintf("http://radio.weblogs.com/%07d/index.html", usernum)

Most of Radio's page-templates can be changed easily. However, some are generated deep in the bowels of the program, and are much harder to alter. One thing that falls into the latter category is the 'calendar' of posts that is rendered on the front-page of the weblog. The calendar displays the dates on which posts have been made in the most recent calendar month, but is only ever updated when a new post is uploaded to the weblog. As such, the calendar is a very accurate way of gauging the month in which the weblog was last updated.

So, without further ado, the results of the obvious spider. Note that if a post was updated in the last month, it was also recorded as having updated in the last three months.

The scan was performed mid-June, 2003.

Usernums 0100000 - 0105000

Assigned between January 2002 - March 2002

  Active Last Month: 87
  Active Last Three Months: 211
  Active Last Six Months: 371
  Active Last Year: 649
  Updated At Least Once: 3636
  Never Updated: 1187

  404'd: 109
  Couldn't Work Out: 68

Usernums 0105001 - 0110000

Assigned between March 2002 - June 2002

  Active Last Month: 84
  Active Last Three Months: 185
  Active Last Six Months: 290
  Active Last Year: 498
  Updated At Least Once: 3208
  Never Updated: 1331

  404'd: 426
  Couldn't Work Out: 35

Usernums 0110001 - 0115000

Assigned between June 2002 - October 2002

  Active Last Month: 100
  Active Last Three Months: 189
  Active Last Six Months: 287
  Active Last Year: 3107
  Updated At Least Once: 3239
  Never Updated: 1560

  404'd: 164
  Couldn't Work Out: 37

Notes:

1. This is by no way a good gauge of Radio Userland usage. The product is also used as a news aggregator (and can be done so without making use of it for blogging). Also, Radio sites can be, and are often hosted off the radio.weblogs.com server.
2. Months are calendar months, and the scan was performed halfway through June. As such, "in the last month" is really "in the last two weeks". The author thinks, though, that "in the last three months" is probably the most accurate (and possibly even a bit generous) measure for a weblog still being 'live'.
3. "Never Updated" means that one of two standard texts was found on the page that mark it as a placeholder for a weblog. It means that the user never uploaded a single thing to their Radio weblog.
4. "Couldn't Work Out" means that neither a radio-standard calendar, nor a standard "haven't updated yet" page could be found. While it's possible that some people may have messed with the Radio internals enough to modify the calendar beyond recognition, or perhaps decided against having a calendar at all, most of the "Couldn't work out" pages I randomly checked up on after spidering were redirections for blogs that had moved elsewhere.
5. As far as I can work out, the highest usernum assigned on the radio server is somewhere around 25000. I stopped at 15000 partly because I was bored, and partly because weblogs newer than six months old are probably not as useful as statistics.
6. I have no idea what these statistics mean. I suspect they don't mean anything. For the most part, I think they're an indication of how many people don't use a trial-ware product after the end of its trial period. If you look at the Livejournal use statistics, you'll see a much larger participation rate, but if you look down to see how many of those users are actually paying for the service, it's still down around 5%.
7. I'm not publishing the script itself, because that might encourage lots of people to test it out, hammering the servers for no real purpose.