ON STOWE BOYD'S "CONVERSATIONAL INDEX"

BEWARE WHAT YOU WISH FOR

OK, I'll bite.  Against my initial reservations, I'm posting on Stowe Boyd's post introducing his "Conversational Index". 

What is it, you ask?  Well, here it is from the inventor himself:

"...successful blogs -- ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start -- shared a common characteristic:

The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation -- as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers -- than posting articles.

I will call this the Conversation Index, just to put a handle on it.

Here's the current picture for /Message (Stowe's new Blog), a CI of 80/102 = 0.784."

Simple idea, good explanation, not to mention pithy algorithm and good basic motive: 

An attempt to measure the basic "Conversation"-generating oomph of a blog.

Several folks on memeorandum are expressing enthusiasm for the idea, including Zoli and Don Dodge here. 

And then there are some like Go Flock Yourself that have reactions like:

"I’m very happy to pronounce to the world that GFY sports a Conversational Index of 0.135 (233 posts/1724 comments), a number that should make Stowe’s beret flip up off of his head and fly around the room like a frisbee..."

Where do I come out on this?  Well, I've been long-convinced of the value of comments in blogs as the next logical step of blog mining evolution.  (see "Comments Search: the next big mother lode of user-generated content (UGC) and this post last June)

But Stowe's idea of creating a mathematical formula has a Google like simplicity at it's core.  He even visualizes it as a living, breathing thing:

"I hope someone out there -- some bored toolsmith, or a computer science student looking for an interesting project -- will build a tool that will scan a blog, determine the CI, and provide the result as a chicklet that we can embed on our blogs. Even better would be a 30 day graph, like Tufte's sparklines, that shows the social interaction ebbing and flowing."

It all sounds mesmerizing.

Until you realize that if the Conversational Index (CI) did in fact take off, both as yet another way to rank blogs on the Internet, and then actually as a tool to commercialize said rankings into real dollars for the bloggers, then might not this lead to the next logical step?

The overnight reversal of seeing Trackback and Comment Spam as BAD things, to actually GOOD, welcome things?

That is to say, we may need a mechanism to independently verify that the Trackbacks and Comments reported as a component in the CI calculation are Good and Pure of the Spammy Stuff.

Not to mention the inevitable emergence of "Comment-fraud" and Trackback-fraud" to take their place along-side of "Click-fraud".

Despite these possible negatives, thinking about the Conversational Index at least gets folks to start thinking about the value in comments and trackbacks.

UPDATE:

Stowe has officially revised the CI formula in reaction to Don Dodge's suggestion.  Here's the post for reader convenience:

"Don Dodge had apparently come up with the Conversation Index on his own, although he inverts the calculation:

[from Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: The Conversational Index for blogs]

Note, I have calculated the number differently than Stowe, but the meaning and measurement is the same. Using my formula and Stowe's blog stats his blog has a CI of (71+31)/80=1.27. Stowe Boyd has several blogs, and is a very well known writer, so my guess is that these numbers are from one of his newer, and lesser known, blogs.

Hmmm. Since the arithmetic is barely a day old, I am willing to be swayed. I guess it makes more sense that as the conversation increases the ratio gets bigger. So I will switch over to Don's formula, instead of my first pass."

 

 

 

 

Comments

[candice]

But what about all the other commentary? I have friends that stop me when they see me to say "Hey, I saw the new pictures on your blog, that was cool." Or the commentary that comes in via IM and email, too. That's blog-created conversation, off the radar from the public.

I just have a personal site for the most part, though, the most 'relevant' thing I tend to have to anyone else is all the crap regarding hurricanes, and the occasional rant about bad programming.