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March 16, 2005

Metrics for the New Blog Millenium

I had no idea, all day long that I was getting a spike over the Blog Patronage post. Cool beans. I think it has been my biggest day since Cosby and/or Nick Berg. So while I actually did no surfing today (which is a good idea on your first day at work), I did jot down some notes about metrics for blogging. They are as follows.

Here are the adjectives: Here are the metrics

Profligate: Average blog posts per day.

Profound: Average trackbacks per post.

Popular: Average visits per day (already in TTLB)

Pervasive: Links per blog (already in TTLB)

Populist: Average comments per post.

Verbose: Average words per post.

Reverent: Average # of external links per post.


I'm not going to go to any great lengths to defend these and I think they're pretty self-explanatory. Anyone with a modicum of spare time and SQL skills could manage the programming, and you know that bloggers would break their necks to find out such data on their blogs. I leave the rest as an exercise.

There are a few other dimensions of blog performance which could be subjected to numerical analysis, but they would require a bit more resourcefulness. For example, how may RSS subscribers does a blog have? How many mentions does the blog get by A-List bloggers? How many mentions by mainstream media. I mention these without having paid much attention to Blogshares, or the recent rates at Blogads.

Again, I happen to think that blogs are primarily subjectively valuable and not objectively so. But we do play the game of popularity and many bloggers do so for money, just like the mainstream media. Anyone who lists themselves in Technorati, or any of the services plays the ratings game too. Maybe, just maybe we could improve it so that we know more than just popularity and pervasiveness. This is in no way to knock NZ Bear or the Ecosystem. He's the JD Power of the blogosphere and I think we're very fortunate to have that free service. So this is just my modest proposal.

Posted by mbowen at March 16, 2005 09:11 PM

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Comments

I've been in technical communication 20+ years. It seems that managers have always been trying to quantify the act of writing, and reduce it to a science -- map software function points to pages of documentation, etc. It doesn't work. Tech writing as a spiritual act doesn't work either, although there is one bona fide technical writing religious cult (Information Mapping) that has taken root at various unsuspecting corporations.

So you're gonna try to reduce weblogs to metrics? To what end, other than idle curiosity? I don't think it would help fulfill the average blogger's need for love very well.

What's an A-list blog anyway? You can probably use hit and link counts to surmise which blogs are most popular; but blogs identified in such a survey are components of several overlapping consumer universes. For example, an LGF reader doesn't hang out in Daily Kos territory much, and vice versa; but both of them always show up in a survey of the most popular blogs. There are multiple A-lists, and only part of each list shows up in a survey such as the TTLB Ecosystem stats.

(That said, PunditDrome is beginning to be used by the MSM as the arbiter of such an A-list. I'm not so sure I'm happy about that.)

Ultimately, if you blog ecause you love doing it, then no metric really matters.* Moreover, you're likely to produce a superior blog that doesn't define itself in terms of what everybody else is doing.

*Speaking of which, I wonder what J.D. Salinger is writing these days?


Posted by: Scott Ferguson at March 16, 2005 11:27 PM

Great metrics.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at March 17, 2005 03:58 AM