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 metricsProfligate: 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.
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