One of the metrics that bloggers track is "Authority" or the number of blogs linking to a blog within the last six months. The higher the number, the greater the level of Authority a blog earns. Most bloggers use the Technorati index to benchmark authority ranking.
The last six months, my Technorati rank has been the same, I have not moved the needle. I thought Technorati might be busted or maybe the Technorati monster escaped. Or maybe, gasp, I'm doing something wrong. But in post on Techcrunch, Brian Solis explains. The post is called "Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere?" and a must-read. (hat tip Geoff Livingston)
It goes back to the definition of authority. Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.
As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.
We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time”
and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging,
commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog
sources because of our active participation in micro communities.
I've noticed this myself. This leaves an issue of how do you measure authority. Brian poses the question as:
He does mention a couple of tools that can help you measure influence:
He goes on to describe a new tool that will debut at SXSW
Hmm .. Lots of think about on the plane ride down to Austin.
Do we really want it to be separated out? If we are measuring online influence, don't we intentionally want it to measure all blogging and microblogging platforms. If technorati isn't measuring twitter influence, we don't really want a tool that subdivides the web and shares the subdivided influence. Don't we want a tool that aggregates/averages the influence across the blog/microblog universe?
Posted by: mikeysames | March 11, 2009 at 01:22 PM
I think Mikey's comment is spot on. One of my observations is that for my slice of the universe (mostly food writing) the initial tools like Digg and Technorati were either uninterested (Digg actually called food writing spam!) or food was too peripheral. I find that tools like Twitter let you self select a like minded group, but there are scant tools to aggregate "influence" or "authority" especially across platforms. Interesting to see what sites like Alltop might contribute.
Posted by: jacqueline church | March 11, 2009 at 11:17 PM
Great Blog Beth, This is the most provactive blog site I have seen. It's the blog I wanted to write, you just beat me to it.
Good comments Mikey and Jacqueline.I feel that in today's society non-profits need to emulate for profits more often. I also feel for-profits need to emulate non-profits. Both have a lot to learn from each other. Just imagine if the auto ex's had come to Congress and presented themselves as passionate and caring people who represented a good cause. The importance for all organizations is to cleary define and adapt their brand if they want to succeed.
Posted by: Joe Leo | March 12, 2009 at 07:24 AM
Beth, I added some explanation as to why some Technorati Authority numbers have shifted here: http://technorati.com/weblog/2009/03/483.html
I also noticed there is still cleanup to do as we had a duplicate record for your blog, which I have removed and your blog should start updating normally. Sorry about that.
http://technorati.com/blogs/beth.typepad.com%2Fbeths_blog
Posted by: Dorion Carroll | March 12, 2009 at 08:41 AM
Beth, yet another great blog. As a newcomer onto the scene just learning about these analytical tools is great!
Hopefully I also just personally boosted your numbers as I added you to the blogroll on my new blog. Please check it out here:
http://aroconsult.net/blog
Looking forward to seeing you @ SXSW!
Posted by: Shannon K. Aronin | March 12, 2009 at 11:55 PM
Thanks for this post, Beth: I just so happened to be researching Technorati last week, so your post especially caught my attention. One thing that I discovered during my own research is that Technorati seems to be more a measure of Popularity, which does not necessarily correlate as a measure of Authority. I captured these thoughts in my blog as a response if you'd like to hear why.
As a side note, regarding a measure of influence - I found this study from HP Labs insightful: it talks about the need to identify "hidden social networks" to determine real influence. Here's the link to the study, in case you're interested:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/twitter/twitter.pdf
Thanks again for your insights, they are very helpful. Hope you are enjoying sxsw! : )
Posted by: katrinah | March 15, 2009 at 06:01 PM
Jeremiah points to a similar problem here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/02/03/i-dont-deserve-this-technorati-rank-and-the-other-1999-of-you-dont-either/
My understanding of Technorati ranking= Number of links * Authority of links over the last 6 months.
That is why if you charted people's incoming links to blog vs. authority there wouldn't be a perfect relationship.
I think some combination of Google, Technorati, Google analytics, and Quantcast are the best free ways to track and compare blogs/influence/authority/trust.
The problem is that if you have a more digg ranking or a YouTube ranking--you get a much more skewed perception. These are incredibly unique online communities and in the case of YouTube (and similar ranking systems). It seems less than 1% participate in ranking (ie millions of views and only 100 ranking users). Those votes also become more of a popularity contest (ie 50 publications control Digg or rather make about 50% of the frontpages).
Technorati ranking, however, hopefully will change into a more transparent and trust based form of ranking.
Posted by: Nathan Ketsdever | March 29, 2009 at 08:47 PM