Update: I am not the only one either! Steve Gillmor can’t understand why Marshall is allowed to keep posting in “such a visible position” on TechCrunch. Read in Full.

Here is a brief summary of the past few months for TechCrunch:

• 12 May - New blog design launches. Much criticised.
• 8 June - Marshall Kirkpatrick starts writing on TechCrunch.
• 12 June - Blog turns one year old.

Dividing the last three months up using the 12ths of the month we get the following statistics:

1. 12 April - 11 May: 87 Posts.
2. 12 May - 11 June: 82 Posts.
3. 12 June - 11 July: 127 Posts.

So we have more or less constant values for the numbers of posts in the first two months, about 3 posts a day. Then in the final month there is a tremedous growth and the number of posts is up by about 50%. I think that is a fairly significant change.

Now there are a fair few reasons why this could have happened. Maybe web 2.0 has got even hotter in the last month and there is a need for more postsI for one have noticed that I have difficulty keeping up with all the posts, and I have found that the posts have become more petty some of them seriously lack news and that “Web 2.0″ focus that the earlier TechCrunch was so good for. More services seem to be getting reviewed and perhaps sometimes services that I don’t think would have got a review before on TechCrunch.

Some posts are complete nonsense. Why these are significant enough to merit a post on a tracking web 2.0 blog I don’t know:

• Digg v3 out of 3 week long beta
• GDrive plays whack-a-mole with bloggers
• NBC will buy Tribe.net

The idea for this post came from me thinking that the number of comments on TechCrunch posts was beginning to decrease as more people like myself found the huge number of posts difficult to deal with, and some of the content tedious. When I got the data together I found that there wasn’t much in it. The figures were:

1. 12 April - 11 May: 3886 comments, 45 per post.
2. 12 May - 11 June: 3858 comments, 47 per post.
3. 12 June - 11 July: 4777 comments, 38 per post.

The first two months bear out very similar levels of participation in terms of comments per post. I would say that the number of comments is some indication on the quality of the writing and the relevance of the post, but obviously it is also an indication of how big the stories were. If the stories had all been pretty small then you can imagine that you’d get fewer comments. The overall number of comments is also up, which will no doubt be seen as a success from the inclusion of Marshall Kirkpatrick in the regular lineup. The first two periods refer to times when almost every post was by Mike Arrington. But it is clearly at least a bit of a drop. Perhaps it is just that the finite readership’s time being spread more finely over the increased number of posts or maybe the posts really are less stimulating.

What do you think? Has TechCrunch changed?

Disclaimer: Data collection was carried out by me using techniques such that the values may be slightly wrong. It is very unlikely that the error in collection could compensate for the larger differences seen though.