Biz360 Advances Influence Metric

Biz360, in its MarketIQ product, is launching a new metric of influence. Rather than a simple count of inlinks (a la Technorati) it looks one step further and measures the rank of those linking to the blog in a compound manner. The basic intuition here is: the potential influence of a blog isn't just a matter of how many readers you have, but how efficient your blog can diffuse over the entire blogosphere. In fact, Biz360's approach is like a trivial version of Google's PageRank and is certainly not the first application of this approach (see this paper by Kritikopoulos et al).

While extending the importance of links in the influence computation is important, readership (and the qualities of your readers) is really the goal. The influence metric that we apply at BuzzMetrics has this as its goal: estimating the readership of a blog (using link counts as one of the input parameters). One of the basic challenges of getting this type of metric right is the availability of data. One would like to have access to:

• In links (in a compound manner),
• Readership stats for the web served pages,
• Feed reader information statistics.

Without direct access to these, one has to look at less direct approaches to estimation which while certainly possible has the potential to leave coverage gaps.

With this clear step in to the influence metric space, Biz360 is directly competing with the core offering of BuzzLogic ('the science of influence').

[via Jeff Jarvis.]

Comments

[Jason]

One small clarification: Recursive blog link analysis isn't the only component of our impact metric; we also incorporate traffic estimates and mainstream media references.

I agree that the ultimate impact metric would include several additional pieces of data: accurate traffic statistics of HTML, RSS, and emailed content; reader demographic information; length of visits; participation/engagement, etc.