Business blogging tips and news for professional bloggers

Stowe, very novel idea.  I agree that there ought to be some way whereby blog search engines measure much more than just the number of links to a given blog.  And I agree that the amount of conversation (comments, trackbacks) going on at a blog relative to its number of posts is an important characteristic.  Your post may lead to lots of new forms of measuring blogs.

But I think we need to take into account a few other things.  I'd love to get some feedback from you and anyone else.  Just some half-baked thoughts to fuel the conversation.

1. Comment quality varies.  Some blog posts have a long line of very short, congratulatory (or derogatory, or spam) comments, for example, while others might have just a few really thoughtful comments.  I'm not sure how to really measure the *quality* of a comment, but I think there's more to it than saying, "Well, Blog X has twice as many comments per post on it as Blog Blog Y does, so Blog X is getting more conversation."

2. Many blogs start out conversation-poor and gradually pick up speed as they gain a consistent following.  What if one could see if Blog X's CI (conversational index) was increasing at a faster rate than Blog Y's?  Perhaps that in itself would be an interesting statistic: the daily rate of increase or decrease in the CI over a given period of time.  (Ten points for anyone who gives this a sexy name.)  So, say on January 1st I have 50 posts, 20 comments and 5 trackbacks at my widget blog: CI = 2.  If by January 11th I have 60 posts, 40 comments and 20 trackbacks, my CI = 1.  (I like Don Dodge's higher-is-better idea - maybe we ought to reverse the formula.)  So over 10 days, my CI has "doubled" (halved).  I'm getting twice as much "conversation" as I was ten days ago.  If my friend's blog on widgets has gone from 20/20/0 to 40/20/0 in those ten days, his CI has *decreased* from 1 to 2.  So someone searching the web for blogs about widgets could readily see that mine has improved in terms of conversation relative to my friend's.  Of course, there could be a default time period for the calculation of this simple growth/stagnation metric - say, one month - but the search tool should allow the user to specify a different time period, like one year or one week.

3. What about the author's comments at her own blog, or trackbacks she sends back to her older entries?  Should those count the same?

4. Could this statistic be meshed with a particular individual's CI?  That is, if I have five blogs, could we somehow calculate my average CI (using the totals from all of my blogs)?

5. Is a comment always equal to a trackback?  Or are trackbacks more important because they are more rare or indicate a foreign post, which typically includes more info than a comment?  (What if I had posted this information at your blog instead of mine, for example?)

6. What about the number of commenters on or trackbackers to a blog?  For example, sometimes we see blogs with hundreds of comments from just a very few faithful, while other blogs have fewer comments, but from a larger number of people.  So maybe the formula should be expanded to reflect the number of commenters/trackbackers, like so:
CI = P / [(C + T) / U].  (P = posts, C = comments, T = trackbacks, U = unique commenters and trackbackers.  Example:

Blog A:
P = 50
C = 20 including author's comments
T = 5 including author's trackbacks
U = 5 including author

CI = 50 / [(20 + 5) / 5] = 50 / 5 = 10.

Blog B:
P = 50
C = 20 including author's comments
T = 5 including author's trackbacks
U = 25 including author

CI = 50 / [(20 + 5) / 25] = 50 / 1 = 50.

Blog A: CI = 10.
Blog B: CI = 50.

Although both blogs have the exact same number of posts, comments and trackbacks, Blog B's conversational index is much higher because it has enjoyed conversational input from a much higher number of people.

7. My head hurts.  I feel like a geek.

Anyway, I hope this gets some more thoughts flowing.  Maybe someone can go all mathematical and sabermetricky on this.  (Somewhere out there is a diehard baseball fan waiting to morph into a bona fide blog statistician!)  I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this.