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"Social gestures" vs links: better thinking about blog value

Earlier I mentioned how there's finally a study of blog readers . Now, thanks to Mary Hodder et al., there's a richer sense of the measure of blog value than we get from links alone, which can be very misleading.

So a couple of months ago, at a dinner at Les Blogs, a group of us (including Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls and Halley Suitt among others) talked about what it would mean to make an index that could give a clearer sense of a blogger's reach and influence, that might upend the inbound link counts to give some clarity to what is now opaque and hard for us to see blogs we are unfamiliar with but want to find context. Actually, the service was taking a while, and with 30 or so bloggers in the room, eventually things turn to blogging. We started talking about the issue of inbound links and how, counted up and reported as a kind of "attention index," as a show of interest or attention or conversation, they weren't very interesting or telling on their own, partly because they lump together all types of links, no matter when the links were made or where they are from (blogrolls or posts).


Part of what we want is a rich user generated ontology resulting in topic groups that is constantly adjusting to find what's delightful, useful, interesting across blogs. And a more complex metric for understanding those topic groups and individual users as they blog memes and interact with each other, with some context around those bloggers, would help quite a bit.

jon posted this at 7:05 PM
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