Want More?The second day of the Blog Business Summit featured a keynote by Weblogs Inc. founder and Netscape.com General Manager Jason Calacanis, who explained in a nutshell why blogs are so powerful: When done well, they are a direct route to influence. Teresa Valdez Klein's notes sum up a good talk.
The meat of the day, though, were several sessions about metrics. My general reaction to the presentations is that there is confusion about measuring one's blog traffic and seeking to understand the market through blogs. Each is important in its own way, but they rely on completely different metrics.
Unfortunately, because volumetric metrics, such as page views and RSS subscriptions, are the primary measures applied by bloggers to gauge their success, people seek to apply those metrics to the world at large to understand influence. The former are great for calculating your potential revenue, but they tell us nothing about engagement and influence.
Consider, too, the emphasis on how search engines and meme trackers spread the message. Robert Scoble tracked the spread of the Jason Calacanis' talk today through blogsearch engines, for example. These are important to discovery of information, but they do not tell much about how messages are reinforced, unless you dedicate hours a day or more to doing the analysis manually and intuitively.
Mary Hodder, founder and CTO of media search and community developer Dabble who presented during the Monitoring RSS and the Blogosphere session, talked about her extensive research on blog reach and influence.
Mary, a good friend with whom I've talked about BuzzLogic (and previously, when it was Persuadio) since its inception, made an effective case that popularity is not a proxy for influence. Instead, one needs to look at a variety of factors, including how frequently someone posts about a particular topic, how reliably and quickly their posts pick up contextually related links, and much else.
All the speakers agree that, at best, we have only scratched the surface of understanding who is changing markets and how.
Bonus link: Halley Suitt asked rhetorically early in the day if RSS is just in its infancy or already long in the tooth. I asked my readers at ZD Net for their reaction. At this writing, after leading the pack by a wide margin early in the day, the "only getting started" votes held 45 percent while "starting up the adoption curve" (31 percent) and "long in the tooth" (23 percent) have gained as more people voted.