Research Supports Conversational Index

Some research by a University of Amsterdam researcher and Buzzmetrics support the principles behind the Conversational Index, namely that having lots of comments (they didn’t look at trackbacks, lamentably) is an indicator of a blog’s importance:

[from ResourceShelf]

New Research Paper (DRAFT): Large Scale Study Looks at Comments Posted on Weblogs (8 pages; PDF)

This time the prolific Dr. Gilad Mishne from the University of Amsterdam and Natalie Glance from Buzzmetrics have written (what we’re linking to is a draft) about their research into commentary left of weblogs. This paper will be presented at a blogging ecosystem workshop during the WWW2006 conference next month. We’ve posted several other new papers by Dr. Mishne here and here during the past couple of months including one focused on blog search.

And the results?

These tables show the relationship of comments and popularity.

Their conclusions:

I can’t translate this data to the CI model (because of the lack of trackbacks), it strongly supports the metric (although, I didn’t consider the size of comments — since I don’t have an easy way to get those numbers). And I am suprised that the authors didn’t come up with a formula like the Conversational Index, themselves.

19 April 2006 Permalink

The new way to launch your product or company

Two of my buds at the Web 2.0 Workgroup, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, beat me to the punch on Cocomment. Robert is enthusiastic while Michael is more lukewarm.

The idea is to collect all the comments that you leave on other blogs, so that you can keep track of them (there might be pearls of wisdom in there), and perhaps so that you can display them on your blog or website. I got access to the closed beta, and signed up. Check out the shiny new widget in the right margin!

The system is not foolproof. The first comment I captured, using the bookmarklet provided, wound up with no title, for example, and there seems to be no way to edit the cocomments once captured.

Here’s what the service shows after my first comment:

Here’s the user experience when making a comment (in this case, at Micropersuasion):

But it appears to do what it says it will, and it doesn’t force you to use a different interface for entering the comments, as Michael Arrington seems to state. [Update: Michael has posted a new piece, following his actual use of the product, and clarifies this.] You enter the comments in the normal fashion, using the native commenting interface, and then, prior to hitting the submit button, you click on the cocomment bookmarklet. That javascript runs, collecting the information needed from the page, and then, depending on the blogging solution involved, it either submits the comment on your behalf, or lets you press the button. I have seen both behaviors. Pretty cool.

I hope that the cocomment cocreators will provide more control on the display options in the widget, but its workable as is.

And this is potentially an improvement over using del.icio.us to keep tabs on the dark comments that we sprinkle all over the blogosphere, and then lose track of. I hope they develop a tool to go find all the unclaimed comments I have out there, moldering in various forgotten corners.

[Update: I forgot to mention the permalink that is assigned to every cocomment. Does this mean that we might start linking into the cocomment space, instead of to the original posts? I don’t think so.

Also note the social dimension of the tool: you can access a tag cloud of the most active users, and when you click on ‘Stowe Boyd’ that brings you to the list of my cocomments.

They provide a similar tag cloud of the most cocommented blogs.]

5 February 2006 Permalink