The challenge of identifying the authority of a blog was raised yesterday at econsultancy’s Online PR roundtable.
Technorati recently changed its blog authority ranking to reflect the real time potency of a blog rather than influence over time. Consequently only very high profile blogs are being rated.
The number of inbound links combined with Google PageRank was proposed as a solution at yesterday’s roundtable.
AdAge uses an algorithm based on PostRank, Yahoo InLinks, Alexa Points and Collective Intellect to generate it Top 150 league table. Author Todd Andrik also adds a subjective measure based on frequency, relevance and creativity.
Edelman’s Jonny Bentwood proposes a ranking methodology based on a broader range of variables. These are Google PageRank, inbound links (via Google and Yahoo!), RSS subscriptions (via Google Reader), frequency of postings and most recent post, comments and inbound Twitter links.
How do you measure the authority of a blog?
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I’ve just been involved in setting up a Top 25 blog list so spent a lot of time looking at different metrics including inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations and number of readers/subscribers. A combination of these plus consideration of engagement (comments etc) can give you a good indication of authority.
Why does the authority of a blog matter, unless it generates financial gains or other commercial/personal objectives? That’s what needs to be measured. Authority only matters if people act upon it, not if they just gas on about it.
Has anyone tried to measure the authority of a newspaper, beyond The Sun self-professing its electoral pull of course?
Rest assured some of us have developed quite robust ways of doing this…
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I’d argue there is a difference between relative and absolute authority (or influence). And that’s why this whole area is full of challenges. Example: Google PageRank attempts to rate pages in an absolute way. But that assumes that there is a general league table of influence, The world isn’t like that. One person may have huge influence in one area and not in another. How do you work out how and what they may influence?
In trad B-to-B PR terms, the FT has general “authority” – but relative to the specific aims and goals of a client? It might – it might not – or rather the level of “authority” it might command relative to a particular set of circumstances will clearly vary.
Typical of the PR industry, come up with black art reaction and ignore the research – soooo professional.
The research work presented by Bruno Amaral this July (bledcom.com) is based on blog discourse. It shows the proof of concept in analysis of (blog) discourse for the creation and development of relationships (oh, and for those who want to know buying and selling is part of a relationship for lots of people as well).
What, it seems, this debate might be about is the extent to which there are common tokens identified and expressed with mutual understanding as to the values that are attributed to them by actors which will ensure relationships are created, re-enforced and extended.
One way of doing this is to use semantic analysis to identify commonly held and agreed values (which is what Bruno did).
This may provide the same answer as a mash up of inlinks, page rank, alexa traffic figures, bloglines citations, number of readers/subscribers, words published per day, number of comments etc.
The one thing we do know is that one approach is definitely built of sound science and three years of solid, peer reviewed, research and the other may not be.
If one was betting the survival growth and profitability of your company on the methods used, there might be a reason for choosing one methodology over another.
But, hell, I am an academic most of the time and only a part time practitioner.