Rankings, Comparison, and Metrics
The absolute uselessness of the Techmeme Leaderboard is being noticed and agreed upon by what seems to be every blogger on the internet minus a small minority. There is a fascination with rankings and top 100 lists. As I see it there are two driving forces for the creation of and attention to these lists: advertising money and ego.
The problem is that linear rankings do not meet the needs of advertisers, and being #1 on a list (or number 49,726) is not really what we want for ego either.
When we buy advertising for our resale clothing store in Nashville we don’t look for the #1 TV and radio station in Nashville. We look for the media outlets that serve people who have similar demographics as our target customers. What we are looking at is what we can expect the reach of our advertising campaigns to be (i.e. how many 12-24 females will our ads reach). That is the same kind of information that is needed for blog rankings to be meaningful. The Techmeme Leaderboard and the Technorati Top 100 are too broad to be meaningful in that context. In many ways the data needed to provide a measure of a blog’s reach is already available; it is just not being pulled together right yet. I don’t think that demographic information is necessary since there are inherent flaws in the assumptions about demographics anyway. However, information about the level of readership (web traffic and feed subscribers), combined with the level of engagement of the readers (comments and links) tells us about the size of the audience. The content on the blogs (the taxonomy authors use to describe the content as well as the search terms that people use to find the blogs) tell us about the interests of the audience. Creating a non-linear ranking system based on readership, engagement, and topic would provide a much more meaningful gauge for advertisers. (That means more money for bloggers).
In terms of ego, the isn’t much utility in ranking blogs in a linear fashion. For me, and I assume most bloggers, the ego metric that would be really meaningful is a measure of our influence. Those same measures of readership and engagement can be combined to help us understand how influential we are. By looking at those metrics in context of the topics people are actually reading and engaging in would provide a much more meaningful ranking system for the ego measurement bloggers so eagerly clamor for.
What I think is most important about this approach is that it is not something that can be gamed. A system like this would give a much more authentic blog ranking system.
Obviously I have been giving this some thought and obviously there is more work to do. Still, it is something I am working on.
