I wrote up some thoughts and presented some data recently around the relationship between counts of readership, inlink counts and a model of influence. I got some quality comments from people regarding the presence or absence of a correlation as well as thoughts on the relationship between inlinks, feed subscription counts and so on.
However, the comment that proved the most interesting to me was that from Jeremy Zawodny who observed: the whole premise of this article is stupid. Now, I know I am suffering from a slightly shiny view of the blogosphere as I read 'Citizen Marketers', but I would have expected something at least constructive from Jeremy. Naturally, I followed up with an email to him, but so far he has failed to cast any light on what he was thinking of. The problem I have with his comment is that while it indicates his opinion of my post, it provides no reason at all. And since he uses the term 'stupid' I feel like he is wasting his breath. I mean, I would never say anything like 'Jeremy is an ass' without backing it up with some reason or other.
To be technical, there were a number of premises in the article: that influence was a hot topic, that inlinks are used as a proxy for influence measurement, that readership was an important factor and that there is an assumed relationship between inlinks and feed readership. Pretty stupid, I know.
It is indeed a very interesting (actually strange is a better word) comment.
One can only wonder what he is referring to.
One explanation of course is that he misunderstood something. Read the article too quickly or whatever.
I for one didn’t think it was stupid. I found the data interesting.
But doesn’t your model rest on the assumption that all those who subscribe are of equal influence? That a subscription to your blog from a teenager on myspace carries the same weight as a subscription from a journalist at NY Times or the most recognised thinker in your field?
It seems to me that the model doesn’t cater for indirect influence. Nor does it take into account how many feeds the subscriber subscribes to. How much share of the subscriber’s attention you have, so to speak. Surely you will be influencing someone who subscribes to a few feeds more than someone who subscribes to hundreds.
Never the less I can’t wait to hear what sparked that strange comment. Nor can I wait to hear what you find out regarding the model.
Posted by: Flemming Madsen | December 23, 2006 at 06:58 PM
Flemming,
I totally agree with you regarding the difference between the ability to influence an individual who reads say 1 blog versus an individual who reads 100. The issue there is the need for a model of competing attention. It reminds me of something the creator of the playstation said when asking what the competition was: cell phones and girlfriends.
In some sense, the blog-blog graph is an easier place to experiment with this type of model. For example, if blog A has links from blog X and blog Y, but blog X only ever links to A and blog Y links to A and 99 others, one could argue that A has more influence over X than Y. To get right in to the technicalities, one would also have to assign some weight to this graph: I may read 10 blogs, but I might in some sense pay more attention to the posts on one than another.
At any rate, I feel that the time is ripe to look beyond the naive link count account of the blogosphere.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | December 23, 2006 at 08:05 PM