Posted by Marshall on September 14, 2008 | Link It
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Was trying to write a post last night (in between a FeedBurner problem which I fixed on this blog) and a software update, and I lost the post. However, what I was seeking to prove was, using Radian6 , that much of the “noise” that’s dominating the conversation on the Presidential Election is coming from the Right.
The problem I found with Radian6 is that it can’t easily segment the voices and tie it back to intent - in Web Analytics, we can set up custom segments and follow the pathing though a site, in Radian6, the closest thing one can do is set up a “source filter” but it’s too cumbersome to do it for several sources of media -it’s almost as if the data from Raidan6 ought to be able to be Mashed Up, like stuff you can do in sites such as Many Eyes, etc. But you can’t do that today. Still, what I found was interesting - and got me thinking about how conversations are dominated.
When I thought about it, using Radian6, I found the Influentials for Sarah Palin, mostly on the Left and Center (see below); you would have thought the reverse, based on the news. Could it be that whomever figures out how to dominate the conversations, shout the loudest, wins?
Yes, I wish Radian6 could tell me the “Who” behind what stories are going out - sure, it can give you the “influentials” (see below)
But it will still take additional work to find out (for example) how much of what is in Huffington Post is muddying up the waters or not.
With so much coming from the Huffington Post - I wonder if the real issues of “message” are the Conservatives and Neoconservatives are simply more focused, two dimensional stereotypes that are able to succeed with noise pollution, perhaps even using other liberal blogs in a viral way.
It’s almost as if what the Barack Obama really needs now is to focus the message - use the resources he has, just like the Republicans have learnt to do - to create message, just as they do. For all the talk, I don’t see Democrats good at that - everyone is so busy wanting their own point of view, that’s my sense of it, that they don’t come together enough to decide what the message it - and how to create their own “white noise“, maybe.
It’s not about slinging more mud, it’s using the resources you have - it’s focusing the message and using all the blogs and Social Media to push it out, into Google, into other search engines and social networks - into Mainstream Media.
The Left is really, really good at that, dominating the conversation - they have gotten really good at making a few people look like 10,000 people when they want to - I believe that’s how they won in 2000 and 2004, and partly how they think they will win today, as I wrote in Real News vs. Perception - Paul Krugman’s Blizzard of Lies post (along with an expected October Surprise - how could there not be one or two of those? - they seem to happen, almost as if on cue, just before the election, usually to the incumbent’s party advantage).
Actually, there’s nothing really wrong with having orchestrated news as long as you can get the real news from somewhere else, and as a political party, you have a way to have more input into how news is orchestrated, so at least, people get a fair, balanced point of view; but they don’t, the Right knows how to manipulate the news much better than the left - that’s how they win, I’m convinced of it now, having thought about it a bit over the last 8 years - they find a way to control and dominate the conversations, and then, they win.
So would it be fair to say, who ever defines and controls the conversations, politically, wins? What do you think?
I found a lot of problems to fix now that Webmetrisguru.com has moved off of Know More Media - and I’m thinking, this is something we need help with, and I’m reaching out to a few people involved to see if they can help.
Here’s the problems I’ve noticed since the blog has been up today:
1. Categories diden’t map properly
Category = web analytics
due to that disparity - all the indexed category listings are now returning 404 errors (but there’s not even a custom 404 page yet).
I also noticed a lot of duplicated categories - like one listing (top level) than the same listing 10 times again, in the category editor - not sure why.
It looks like a few missing tables and redirects are needed in order to fix this problem. The problem might be that the mappings might not exist in the exported data we got. But even if it does exist, would we have to do the import all over again? I don’t know - that’s why we need help.
2. The Urls themselves didn’t map to exactly what Google had in it’s index
Again, it’s essentially a redirect issue or a url re-write in the database, itself. This is the kind of problem that can be a piece of cake if you know exactly what your doing, or very, very hard and time consuming, if you don’t.
My gut says - hire someone to fix this that knows the problem and how to solve it quickly.
The last problem is the simplest to solve, by comparison. The RSS feed url of the orginial site needs to be perserved on the new one - perhaps the Feedburner plugin will accomplish that - don’t know:
It’s hard to have anticipated these problems, even though there’s several articles online about people who have run into this - it’s hard to really digest the difficulties of moving from one platform to another - till you actually have to do it.
So I ask you all, who read this, to be patient with us - we’re clearly going to solve this, but it will take a little time.
"…the take home lesson is this: BlogJuice, EatonWeb, SEOMoz Page Strength and a whole slew of ranking tools (probably even GOOG itself)use Technorati data to evaluate the strength and authority of websites. And the temptation is to assume that a massive company like Technorati gets everything right.
Well that's wrong. Today I found out that Technorati wasn't tracking or storing data properly for at least one blog. I wonder how many others are out there with the same problem. You'll only know if you look;-)"
The implications are that ranking blogs based on derived data from other services into some sort of equation is only as reliable as the data sources itself. In Are You a Traffic Hound or Blog Authority? Blog Authority is about "about the relationships. You want return customers coming back for more and telling their friends about what you have to offer. You want to build a reputation and become the source for the right information for the right people in the right industry."
I feel the idea of Technorati Blog Authority where blog "….authority is (measured by) the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has" is a flawed way of looking at Blog Authority because it's getting links from other blogs can easily be manipulated on one hand, and is easy to do, so it does not actually measure Blog Authority in my book; Technorati Rank is based on Technorati Authority, so it too, is flawed, perhaps worthless. I know many still find uses for Technorati, but I think Technorati Blog Authority and Blog Rank are next to worthless.
When Technorati is on the blitz for a blog - it may mess up even it's Google Ranking, if I'm reading Ryan Caldwell's post correctly (I don't know why Google would look at Technorati as a ranking factor when it has it's own blog search engine ….. and I'm of the opinion that Google does not use Technorati Blog Authority or Blog Rank for anything).
So what if SEO is impacted and you'd have to be on top of all the any data source that's used to measure influence and authority of a blog or website? I'm just wondering if a rating systems like the Algorithm for the Dirt 100(a derivative of other rankings such as Google PageRank, Bloglines Subscribers, Technorati Authority Ranking, Alexa Ranking and Dirt Points) really measures anything at all?
"…Let's imagine we have three blogs: A, B and C. A has 10, 000 readers, B has 100 readers and C has 10 reader. Let's also characterize the topics that these blogs write about. A writes about topics t1, t2, …, t10, B writes about t5 and t6 and C writes about t5 only.
Now, suppose C writes something interesting on topic t5 and both A and B links to this post adding their own particular commentary. Who will drive more traffic to C? A or B? While A has many more readers than B, it is topically a very broad blog. The writer doesn't have the time (or expertise) to really go deep into the issues of all these topics. Consequently, her audience is not made up of experts in those areas and reads there to get a high level picture over a broad range of topics. On the other hand, B's readers pretty much just go there for 2 topics. B has time to go in to detail and understand those topics and is probably spending plenty of off line time in that topical space as well. Consequently, B will actually send more traffic (not relatively more, but absolutely more) to C than B will due to the specialization of his audience.
What I'm describing above is the difference between some notion of popularity (which may be called influence) and some other notion of authority (or expertise) and how these issues are related to both the blogger (blog) and the readers of that blog or feed."
Matthew Hurst suggested we measure RSS Feed Readership by TOPIC as a way of measuring blog authority and blog influence and suggests that Feedburner and BuzzLogic each have part of the answer.
So here's what I'd put forward as a ranking algorithm for Blog Authority.
Blog Authority should be Topical - with no authority measured for a blog except by topic (or… you can add the sum of all the topics a blog covers by the amount of authority it has in each topic).
Total RSS Subscribers of a blog per Topic (determined by having Google dissect FeedBurner RSS Readership for a blog post that has be categorized by Topic) divided by the Total RSS Subscribers for all Feedburner RSS Feeds by that topic.
Example of my suggested Blog Authority Algorithm:
Blog A has 20000 RSS subscribers and writes about Celebrity Buzz. At the moment Blog A has 400 of it's RSS Subscribers that read a blog posts about Celebrity B.
Blog C has 400 RSS Subscribers and 200 of those subscribers read posts about Celebrity B.
It's been determined that there's an overall RSS Readership this month of 400000 subscribers that read about Celebrity B on all FeedBurner blogs.
Blog Authorityof Blog Aon Celebrity B = ((400/20000) *400000) where the result will become a numerical score/ranking factor (IE: this case, the score = 8000).
The Blog Authority of Blog C on Celebrity B = ((200/400) *400000) with score = 20
0000.
By my way of thinking, for the topic of Celebrity B, Blog C, with a much smaller number of RSS Subscribers and less actual readers who read about Celebrity B than those in Blog A, still has much more influence in terms of Celebrity B; therefore, more Blog Authority.
And if you think this is far-fetched, Google has long ago moved towards a Topic Pagerank vs. an overall Pagerank for a website, web page or blog and I saw references to this almost 4 years ago in various SEO Forums - when the Pagerank of some sites would vary depending on the query that was used.
If the Pagerank of a site, or a page, does vary based on the query, then it's likely Google, or any other search engine, decides, at a Pagerank level, what rank each page has based on the topic (but it uses backlinks for this).
The main difference between what Google appears to have done for a while, and what Blog Authority, as Matthew Hurst has layed out and I've redefined (for myself) is that we're using RSS Subscribers, not backlinks, and relying on FeedBurner to somehow breakdown feed readership by topic/post.
And that's where I think we're going - and the better that Google gets at improving FeedBurner to get it to determine readership by a blog's topic, and break down a blog post, by topic (using semantic analysis and tagging) the more accurate and useful will Google's Blog Search Engine and Blog Authority Ranking.
So, I see the key as harnessing FeedBurner to data mine the topic of a blog down to an almost atomic level and the come up with visualizations that enable Blog Authority and even Blog Post Authority to be determined on the fly.
It may then be possible to determine the influence of a Blogger, overall, independent on what they are blogging about or where they blog about it. It may also be possible to calculate the influence of a blog, overall.
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