Back at my Midwestern high school, state law mandated that students could not graduate without having taken a course called consumer seminar. Though a wholly informative course, after college and graduate school, I can’t really remember much about the course or what we learned. I know that I took it during summer school after my junior year of high school and that we spent our last day in class watching this (awesome) movie called “Breaking Away” as a reward for making it through the course. I know that the teacher’s daughter worked in advertising and had written a famous sports jingle, but that’s about all I remember about that class.

Not too long after high school, you find yourself making actual decisions without the benefit of all the information. You sign things because you are either too busy or too visually impaired or too impatient to make out the mouseprint. Sometimes you simply don’t know how to advocate for yourself. You meekly pay your bills, buy your groceries and submit to what companies describe as external pricing pressures. Once in a while you pop open the newspaper to find that a desperate and strung-out consumer has written to a columnist about how her phone company or credit card misbilled her and could the reporter please advise her on what to do? Sometimes the reporter does oblige, and after the whole sordid tale is in print, the PR people usually start looking into this. Things tend to get resolved when bad publicity is at stake. (more…)

There is a good article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on social news sites like Digg and Memeorandum. The article provides a good overview of this growing space.

I have a bit of an Alexa problem. I spend a bit more time than is healthy analyzing the reach of website A compared to website B. The result is cheap posts, but I’m going to do one more before I swear off the practice. So here we go:

(1) Of newspaper websites, the New York Times is by far the most popular, despite being only the third most popular paper in terms of print circulation. The Washington Post is the second most popular newspaper website (it’s fifth in terms of print circuation).

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I haven’t gotten around to reading Crashing the Gate yet, which is the new book by prominent liberal bloggers Marko Moulitsas (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong (MyDD). But I did check out an extended review in the New York Review of Books. It looks like a good read. However, this quote from the review really jumped out at me:

Now there is no denying the juggernaut that is the DailyKos - it is the most popular political blog on the Internet by a wide margin. But “fifty times the number of visits received by the entire right wing blogosphere?” That seems impossible. Below is a Alexa chart comparing DailyKos to Instapundit in terms of daily reach, which is the metric I would associate with “visits”:

Looks to me like DailyKos gets twice as many visits as one conservative blog, Instapundit. Impressive, but something less than fifty times the visits of the entire right wing blogosphere. I know Alexa data is far from perfect, but am I missing something here?

A few weeks ago Sports Illustrated published an expansive feature article (subscription required) about how citizen sportswriters are changing sports journalistm. Obsessive and often posting about events in real time, these sports bloggers are spreading rumors, arguing and just generally feeding their sports addictions 365/24/7. Sometimes they even break stories. By the time a traditional sports columnist publishes their take on a game/issue in the local paper, these guys have changed topics three or four times. The real time nature of sports blogs make traditional sports pages obsolete to truly obsessed sports fans.

So it should come as no surprise that Memeorandum has launched a baseball meme tracker called Ballbug just in time for baseball’s opening day. Ballbug hopes to be the real time newspaper for the most passionate (and computer literate) baseball fans - tracking which stories and blog posts are being talked about the most in the baseball blogosphere.

It should also not come as a surprise that a competing baseball site called striketwo.net beat Memeorandum to market a few weeks ago or that there is a basketball meme tracker called lowpost.net.
There is little doubt in my mind that by the end of the year we will see meme tracking sites devoted to just about every vertical you can imagine - football, finance, health care. It’s just a matter of who enters which vertical first at this point.

I first read about Ballbug on Techcrunch.

Update: I took a closer look at Ballbug and Striketwo.net and Striketwo.net has a big advantage in that it allows you to track entries specifically on the team and players you follow.  Politics and sports are always local.  Here’s a screen capture of the Striketwo.net team tag cloud.

Two quick thoughts on the new Google Finance secton that is being discussed so much online:

(1) After seeing Google Finance for the first time, our lead developer sent out an email pointing out that the stock graphs are fantastic. He’s right. Being able to drag the graphs, a la Google Maps, is a great step forward, as is the identification of the news stories that drive the peaks and valleys in stock price. Well done.

(2) The listing of blog entries related to the stock you are reviewing is a great idea, but the execution isn’t there yet. The fundamental problem is that Google is searching blog entries based on the full company name, in this case “Toyota Motor Corp.” How many bloggers are going to type out “Toyota Motor Corp” instead of “Toyota” or a simple “TM” when posting an entry? This is a blunt instrument at this point.

I have been meaning to write a post on Stowe Boyd’s Conversation Index for awhile, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to it. Then late last week I read that a media monitoring firm had started using it as a metric to track the amount of conversation a blog entry generates, and now I feel compelled to comment. As background, here’s Stowe Boyd’s description of the Conversation Index that started it all:

“While working at Corante, I had the opportunity to peer at the stats for all sorts of blogs that we had going. And one thing that became really obvious is that sucessful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation — as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers — than posting articles. I will call this the Converation Index, just to put a handle on it.”

I think its fantastic if you want to use the Conversation Index as an internal metric of your own success at generating conversation on your blog. Watch how it changes over time. Compare the ratio of different posts to each other. Go for it.

However, the Conservation Index is not valuable as a universal measure for comparing blogs (and blog posts) to each other. Why? Generally speaking, because measuring the conversation generated by a blog post is a lot more complicated than that. Specifically, because there isn’t a univeral method for dealing with trackbacks and comments. You end up comparing apples to watermelons:

(1) Not all blogs accept comments. And some don’t take trackbacks. Technorati’s most popular blog, Boing Boing, doesn’t allow comments or trackbacks in the traditional sense. Other prominent blogs that don’t take comments include Instapundit (#16), the official Google blog (#11), Andrew Sullivan (#72) and Michelle Malkin (#12). And those are just from memory. How do you accurately show the conversation generated by these influential sites using the Conversation Index?

(2) Some blogs moderate comments and others require registration to comment. I know Micro Persuasion (#69) moderates. I’m sure other popular (and influential) blogs do as well. I’ve also abandoned the idea of leaving comments many times when I was asked to register (Personal Democracy and Doc Searls jump to mind). These tactics employed by bloggers to prevent spam/bad language/thread hijacking lead to less conversation. These kinds of sites will have artificially low ratings.

(3) Different categories of blogs attract different levels of participation. Some blogs ask open ended questions that invite a lot of discussion. Others don’t. Personal blogs often attract more comments than more professionally oriented sites, as Rohit Bhargova of Ogilvy has pointed out. In these cases, the level of conversation (particularly the number of comments) says more about the kind of blog it is than its influence.

There is more I could write. Are comments and trackbacks really of the same value (I place more value on trackbacks)? Aren’t links to an article more important than trackbacks (lots of bloggers don’t use trackbacks)? How do you account for comment and trackback spam? How do you deal with sites that have massive open threads that attract comments about what people had for breakfast?

There are too many holes for this to be used as a universal metric in blog monitoring. At its best, it provides an antecdotal measurement of the amount of conversation generated. At its worst, it could lead a client to a false conclusion about the true impact of a post or blog.

Utlimately, I think measuring the conversation generated by a blog is more complicated than adding a few numbers together. I think Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher got it right in a recent post:

“Finding the right metrics to measure a blog’s value as an influencer will never be as simple as measuring numbers of links, comments, trackbacks, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, etc. Because you have to understand the context of each blog and how it fits into its online communities. And you can only do that by being involved in those communities, online and offline.”

Disclosure: The Bivings Group has its own media monitoring product, ImpactWatch. We don’t use the Conversation Index.

Since ImpactWatch is a product we develop, it must come as no surprise that many of us here at The Bivings Group are quite fixated with analyzing and predicting media trends. For those of you that think along the same lines, here’s an interesting website I came across today.

Alexadex allows anyone to participate in guessing which websites are likely to increase or decrease their “reach per million” in Alexa. It “rewards” people that anticipate these trends successfully by allowing people, using fake money, to buy and sell symbolic shares in these websites in a similar way to stock trading. The Alexa index going up would be similar to the price of a share going up. One Alexa “reach per million” point is akin to one fake dollar.

This kind of site basically begs the question “is there a pattern that can help predict website traffic increase or decrease?” The answer, at least on the surface, appears to be yes. There are many members of Alexadex that consistently predict large increases or decreases in website traffic. These people may be on to something. If we were to isolate the data offered by people that are successful in consistently anticipating these trends, we are essentially highlighting websites whose traffic is likely to increase or decrease.

Is this a potential boon for PR and marketing professionals, allowing them to focus their efforts on lesser-known sites that are likely to become much better known, or abandon efforts on other sites before they wither out?

Technorati Tags: Site Traffic Media Trends PR Journalism Web

In Gary’s post about “The Wisdom of Crowds” he referenced Newsvine, a social news site that was in private Beta mode at the time. Well, it went live Thursday and it looks very promising.

The site’s news is fueled by wire feeds such as AP, but also allows users to “seed” the site by posting links to stories from other sources (online newspaper sites, blogs, etc.). Newsvine users can vote on which articles should be given the most prominence and comment on what they read. Most importantly, Newsvine allows users to set up their own mini-Newsvine site - bivings.newsvine.com - where they can post their own articles and opinion pieces. Citizen as journalist.

The one thing that would make this great idea even better is a feature that shows which blogs are discussing Newsvine articles, similar to the feature recently rolled out by the Washington Post. But that’s being picky - Newsvine has fantastic potential and it will be fascinating to watch how it develops.

Prediction: I think its inevitable that a lot of sites like Newsvine will pop up that serve different types of people. Inevitably, Newsvine will take on a personality that will attract some and turn off others. Competing sites will pop up to fill the void. As an example, if Newsvine takes on a liberal bent, a conservative competitor will pop up.
Technorati Tags: Newsvine Media Web 2.0 News Journalism

Blog buzz makes the front page of The Washington Post. (registration required.) Article talks about ConAgra Foods and H-P monitoring blogs for emerging trends in comsumer attitudes. Piece features the blog monitoring company Nielsen BuzzMetrics, formed last week by the merger of Intelliseek and BuzzMetrics.