My penchant for blogs – II, Blog metrics

Aiderss proposed PostRank to measure post quality. What is PostRank? To explain this, consider this scenario. You write a post, and receive some comments on it. Then if your post is good enough, some fellow diggs it, a couple of guys stumble it, and a quite a few bookmark it at delicious. Then someone refers it on their own blogs, and technorati captures this noise. This much data is enough to build a heuristic about quality and reputation of a blog post. It can be summarized as :-

PR1 = k1*Technorati + k2* Digg + k3*Comments + k4*delicious

Now lets add a couple of more variables in this equation. What can those be? Take some popular blog search engines. Lets choose Icerocket, and google blog search. Now add some weight to these two variables, and add them to the equation.

PR = PR1 + k5* icerocket + k6* google

Now we have arrived at a very primitive post rank. This heuristic gives a course idea about popularity. There are a couple of loopholes in this, and it is easy to tame this heuristic. First of all, comments can be doctored by a person, and it is tough to validate the authenticity of comments of the blog. Also, bookmarking on delicious and stumble is a fairly easy job, and an author can play it easily. Same hold for digg. So lets give less weight to these variables, and give more weight to icerocket, google, and technorati. Out of these, google blogsearch should be left out because of its reputation (pun intended). technorati does not cover all the blogs. e.g it does not cover Paul Graham’s Hacker news, Techmeme and other aggregators, where decent discussions happen on blog posts across blogosphere. Icerocket also falls in same basket. Thus, even if you write good content, your post rank might be almost nothing.

Now what variables do you wish to be added to make this heuristic strong and better? I leave this question open for this week. You can mail me, or leave your views in comments.

To close, a small problem. Suppose there is a blog A that writes about a, b and c topics. B writes about only b, and C writes on almost anything. If B makes a new post, and A and C refer to that post, then which of A and C will get more traffic to B? If you are ready with the reasoning, then what will be the dependency on number of subscribers of A and C ?