Blogs: Varying Measures In Different Contexts

Tom Foremski writes, "As blogging moves out of the Geek communities and into many more sectors, that sharing principle is how influential blogs become created and distributed and that is how you will recognize the leaders. Finding the right metrics to measure a blog's value as an influencer will never be as simple as measuring numbers of links, comments, trackbacks, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, etc. Because you have to understand the context of each blog and how it fits into its online communities. And you can only do that by being involved in those communities, online and offline". Absoulutely right – the popularity or the content value can’t be just correlated to measured traffic – its based on the, nature of topics covered ,frequency of publications and every blog has a certain context in which it needs to be assessed and Tom is also right on this count as well – the best way to understand the new media is to be a participant therein – as it would open up several things along multiple dimensions - those could give better insights into assessing the sphere of influence of blogs.