Social Media

BlogPulse: Metrics Based on Conversation


Yesterday, I was late to the party with the Shyftr bitchmeme.  Today I'm going to continue that train of thought by being about a day late to the party talking about BlogPulseThey recently came to the attention of Louis Gray when he was featured prominently on the Nielsen blog search engine yesterday (and today too) as being a 'top blog post' with his post Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?.

I think part of the reason that BlogPulse hasn't gotten much press over the years (and it has been years, since they've been around since 2005) is that they're still not competitive on the comprehensiveness of their blog indexing as compared to Technorati and Google Blog Search.  What they do have an angle on is a different way of measuring reach and value for a blog, and it's very much in the vein of what I was attempting to describe yesterday:

The pageview is dying as a monetizable metric. For us big blogs like Mashable, it works, because we have scads of it. Unfortunately, the smaller blogs and communities have issues getting any return on their work, even though they have high levels of engagement, participation, and value contributed. Rather than rolling them all up into some sort of CNet competitor, blogs should shift their focus on monetizing their work in a way that's more valuable - capitalizing their expertise and community engagement.

In that respect, these sites that shard off the community can actually serve to increase that blogs revenue, if they return instead of the conversation, the metrics on that conversation. While the actual address where that conversation takes place may shift around on the Internet, the derivative ideas from that conversation remain more or less branded by the originator.

And from what it looks like to me, BlogPulse, similar to Technorati, seems to be progressing down that same path of measurement more by engagement and conversation as opposed to simple pageview metrics (ala Quantcast, Compete and Alexa).

The difference as to why this matters is that this is Nielsen, here, instead of a Web 2.0 startup. They've, for the last several years, been very much on the fore of trying to measure online text and downloadable media.  They've struck partnerships with Wizzard Media to certify all their podcast downloads. They've joined the Association for Downloadable Media to find more lasting metrics that truly value an online video and audio piece for what it is. They're heavily involved with measuring traffic with the Netratings program.  Point is, they're busy about finding the right way to measure our stuff.

To be real clear, here, they don't go as far with BlogPulse as I describe in my piece, nor as far as most of the Rat Pack described in our ideal situation on this weekend's show. The BlogPulse system functions by measuring amount of links into an article, not quite as simplistic as Technorati's linking algorithm, but essentially the same thing.  It doesn't account for volume of comments, and it doesn't go so far as to take into account things we talked about on the show, like measuring Shyftr comments, Readburner comments, Twitter comments and FriendFeed comments.

Nor would I expect it to.  This meme is barely a few days old.  My point is that Nielsen, in it's dealings with blogosphere rankings and measurement, has decided to look more into the realm of discussion than pageviews as the important metric to watch.  I think this says that my idea (which may or may not be all that original) has some legs and is worth exploring further.

I got a number of interesting responses off yesterday's piece on this topic, but no one has seemed to really come up with the silver bullet yet.  I'm wondering if I'm phrasing my question the right way. What I'm trying to find here, first of all, is the cornerstone of what a superior method of valuing a blog would be than simply by the pageview; something that gives a fair shake to the mid-size blogs (in terms of traffic) as well as the giants. Once we get that fleshed out a bit, then we can talk about the best way to measure that and then monetize it.

You, dear readers, have had a day or so to noodle what I asked you yesterday.  Any brainstorms on that yet?

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