The Basement

On June 21^st Jeff Jarvis posted the first of his now infamous Dell bashing articles titled Dell Lies. Dell Sucks. Yesterday, Jeff posted a link to this postscript. Today it was also mentioned by Hugh Macleod – whom I recently exploited a bit and am feeling a little guilty about. At the time of the original post, I wondered if we would be able to measure the influence of Jeff Jarvis by using a tool like BlogPulse. Shortly after my post, BlogPulse has a few weeks of indexing problems which prevented me from really following up. But those problems have since been fixed thanks to the hard work of Natalie Glance and the gang at Intelliseek.

So today, I revisited my original idea, what can we learn from Jarvis v. Dell by looking at the blogosphere? In my original post, I graphed the trends for the following three queries:

dell

dell and (sucks or lies or lemon or overheats or fucking or lose or "doesn't work" )

(hp or "hewlett-packard" or compaq) and (sucks or lies or lemon or overheats or fucking or lose or "doesn't work" )

I lifted the list of negative word from Jeff Jarvis's original post. Well, my original trend graph had a few problems. First, I tried to include negative mentions of HP for reference. What I did not think about was that 'HP' also stands for Harry Potter. I have since written a lot about taking care when writing queries to prevent this sort of thing. For this post, I started to try to remove Harry Potter mentions but it was getting a little silly and I gave up. As an interesting aside, you'd be surprised how many folks discuss the famous children's series by frequently using the word "fuck" and it's derivatives. I particularly enjoyed this wholesome, eloquent and insightful review. But I digress...

The second problem with my original trend graph was the magnitude of all Dell mentions compared to negative Dell mentions. This scale really makes it difficult to see change in the negative mentions.

So, today I modified it a bit. I removed total Dell mentions and the HP negative mentions and added in "Dell and Jarvis" mentions. I removed the word "fucking" from my list of negative words because I say too many uses of it in the positive, i.e. "fucking awesome laptop" or some such. I also added a negative Dell comments trends that explicitly contain no mention of Jarvis. Here's what it looks like:

Click here to run for yourself.

Now, the dip between June 20 and June 30 is a little misleading – this is some of the remnants of the technical problems BlogPulse had during this period. The interesting thing here is that once Jeff started attacking Dell – and others started talking about Jeff attacking Dell – the number of people that wrote post about Dell including at least one of Jeff's negative words increased. Furthermore, these are generally not posts that are talking about Jarvis!

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of The Influentials. I think Jeff Jarvis is an Influential by the Roper definition (which I'd argue may not mean influencer). As you can see from the BlogPulse trend, mentions of Dell and negative words were edging up already – although this looks to be exaggerated slightly once Jeff started his attacks. So now for the mind bender – Did Jeff Jarvis cause this trend of Dell negativity or due to his network was he more sensitive to it and simply act (perhaps subconsciously) as an early indicator? In other words, bell cow or bellwether? Influentials tend to be pragmatic, majority adopters – not early adopters – so why did Jeff Jarvis switch to Apple and not HP or some other Windows PC vendor? I would argue that, due to his social/professional network that he inherently knows somethings the the rest of us don't quite realize yet – perhaps that Dell is suffering from growing pains and is starting to show it in the form of service failings at an increasing rate, or that the world has changed to a point that the conventional wisdom that you need MS Office on Windows to conduct business is flawed and that as long as you have a reasonable web browser you can pick which ever computer give you an I rule experience – or whatever.

As a side note, Dell has said that it's policy towards blogs and other online forums is "look, don't touch". This reminds me of my discussions about corporate blogs with the WOMMA crowd. In the Jarvis case, Dell's policy prevented them from being able to respond, defend, and investigate the source of the problem. By the time changes are made at Dell (assuming we know changes are afoot - which we don't) and those changes are seen by consumers and the consumers start to talk about it – will it be too late?

So is Jeff Jarvis bell cow or bellwether? Either way, I think Dell would be better off doing more that just listening.

In his post How Not to get Fired for Blogging he mentions the domain ihatemyjobandmyboss.com. Don't bother clicking on it, there's nothing there...yet. But if you hurry over to Dotster and register it for $15 and the pay the $10 for DNS - you can be there.
[UPDATE: Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. The domain of mention was registered by Anthony DeFreitas of Snellville, GA on Aug 1, 2005.]

Why haven't I done this already? Karma. I've already done it once today after seeing this post from Hugh Macleod and I want to spread the wealth.

When heavily read bloggers make offhanded references to unregistered domains they create an opportunity for someone to be standing where everyone else will soon be looking. And if you're wondering if you'd get any traffic...you would have gotten a hit from me.

So remember, if you're really desperate to get linked to by an A-lister just look for a link to crawl under.

Chris, if you happen to be reading this - I love your podcasts and, for what it's worth - my wife and I love listening to you and Ponzi. We also met on match.com and we laughed at how familiar your story sounds.

Wow, seven weeks. That's how long I've been blogging. Seems like longer really. I kind of started this on a whim as an experiment and, at least for the moment, I'm pretty obsessed. Lot's of folks have said encouraging things, starting with Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users and most recently Jonathan Carson of BuzzMetrics and Spike Jones of Brains on Fire. Thanks to everyone who has supported me. My brilliant and beautiful wife Hetty doesn't read my blog with any regularity but she make tremendous allowances. She says she doesn't read because she'll get the unrecorded podcast version anyway. But if she read me more then we could spend our time talking about more important stuff – like what she thinks about my blog. Oh well. I'm desperately in love with her, what can a guy do?

Lot's of folks don't say anything – I guess this is not all that surprising but it feels a little more weird than I thought it would. This must be a little like doing radio or making movies – sometimes there's no feedback at all to the stuff I find most interesting. Just funny that way. People are different and I guess that's what's so fascinating to me. People.

I have generated some traffic. This is not entirely accidental; I send a fair number of emails to folks prompting them to review my latest rant, leave comments and try to email thank yous to folks that comment here. If I missed you, thanks for commenting – you know who you are. My number are growing. I'm getting an average of 90-100 unique visitors per day to my blog web site, from all over the US and the world. I have a fair readership in the UK and Australia and have been mentioned once or twice on non-English blogs – although I'm not sure it was flattering. Any press is good press I suppose. I'm not currently measuring feeds but I have 16 subscribers on Bloglines – which I highly recommend BTW.

What I've learn so far – blogging is a lot harder than it looks – especially if you're actually trying to create content and not just mindlessly linking to the most popular stuff. We all talk about "the conversation" but it's harder to get into the conversation than bloggers will have you believe. Scoble has said that being mentioned by an A-lister isn't all that important anymore – you know as it was in the early-early pioneering days of the blogosphere – like February or something – nothing like now. He says the action is in the long tail, or the flatlands or somewhere. It's a nice idea Mr. Scoble, but given the choice I think I'd prefer the link to being patronized. Don't get me wrong, he earned his hammer and he may wield it in any way he sees fit. Sometimes I wish folks would be a little less smug. I still read him nearly everyday. Hmmm. I will say that Kathy Sierra, Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel have all been quite gracious and have help substantially in priming the well. And of course, I can't forget Mimi over at 72hrchikdom - without her, none of this would be possible, more or less.

Another thing that has struck me is how much there is to talk about and how long it takes to say it. I'm beginning to understand the 30 posts/day of A-listers with their single link and incomplete sentence. Blogging is a real time investment if you don't already have a ready-made audience. I find myself struggling to say something interesting to get people here. Tomorrow I will struggle to come up with something interesting to get them to come back. There is also this bizzaro sense of obligation. I don't mind it so much because I enjoy writing (also more than I expected) but it strikes me as oddly compelling. For example, if I ever did decide to stop blogging, I'd have to blog about it. Somehow I feel like I'd owe it to that guy in Italy whose blog I couldn't read. You know, so he wouldn't worry. Hmmm. Maybe I'm just loosing it altogether or I'm just sleep deprived or...or...or...

Well, it's late and this really doesn't meet the high interest standard that we set here at The Basement but I felt like rambling. It's my blog after all dammit.

Thanks for reading. If you really want to make my day (and I fully understand that perhaps you don't) leave a comment, any comment. That, maybe, will lead to another seven week.

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:2b342e75303e31167d71583b390d5dfa

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:30403c5eb4b051a250987c76cf579724

Please ignore this post -just finally getting around to claiming my feed.

There's been buzz abound about Microsoft's answer to Google Maps. In traditional Microsoft form, the product seems a little rushed to market. It looks like Microsoft is using much older imagery than Google in lots of places.

Case in point, everyone's heard the Apple campus in Cuppertino is completely missing on MSN Virtual Earth but alive and producing iPods on Google Maps. (via The Register via Scoble) This in understandable. Funny. Embarasing. But understandable.

But the fun doesn't stop there, checkout the World Trade Center on Google Maps and then on MSN Virtual Earth. Yes, that's right - Bill Gates has resurrected the WTC. (via Adfreak) So what would Jeff Jarvis say about that?

When you think about it, this is par for the kids from Redmond - present the world something five or six years old and tell them that it's the very latest, most greatest thing ever. Maybe it should be called MSN Virtually Earth. I can't wait until they invent tabbed browsing.

EXTRA GOOGLE BONUS ROUND: (also via Adfreak) Go to Google Moon and zoom all the way in. This is new as I zoomed in the day they announced and it didn't do this. Well done Google - you kids is always thinkin'!

I was recently pointed to results of a wonderful blog readers survey conducted by Blogads. From what I can gather, the survey was announced on March 2, 2005 here and was open for about a week on SurveyMonkey. There were 30,079 respondents. The survey measured blog reader – not just bloggers – but 20.7% were also bloggers. From a strict market research perspective, the sampling methodology might be somewhat less than scientific, but my feeling is that the results are probably pretty representative of active, adult, professional blogs, i.e. I don't think there are a lot of teen-aged girls journal blogs in there. Here's what Blogads has to say about they're, um, methodology...

How much credence should you give this survey? The survey was designed as much to provoke as to prove. I'll paraphrase what I wrote last year: the survey's responses are a fragment of a sample of a subset. There are millions of bloggers. Last week I e-mailed roughly 100 of them -- some of the biggest bloggers, many of whom focus on politics and/or sell blogads -- suggesting they link to they survey. Some of the bloggers I wrote to (and some I didn't) linked to the survey; some of their readers clicked; some were offended by questions written mostly for Americans; some aspiring respondents were unable to complete Surveymonkey's sometimes buggy forms. So wield a salt shaker as you munch on this data.

The interesting thing to me is that Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, had the foresight to ask the 12 question Influentials battery outlined in the Berry & Keller's book, The Influentials. Later, in this post, he claims that "70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%". I suspect that bloggers are even more influential than the aggregated blog readers. Mr. Copeland also published the results spilt out by political party affiliation here. There was a fair amount of discussion about this study back in March but I haven't seen any that really dug into the numbers. I think there is some significant untapped value here. I'm hoping I can get the dataset from the Blogads folks to further dissect these numbers.

I did come up with this tidbit though...based on the straight tabs Mr. Copeland posted here, and the 2001 Roper data reported in The Influentials, I constructed this chart to evaluate how a Blog Influential might be different than your standard garden variety Roper American Influential.

(Click image to get a better view.)

I'm not sure if Berry & Keller included non-responders in their base (I'm guessing yes, but it's unclear from the books footnotes.) There were 3,881 Blogads respondentns that did not mark any of the 11 Influential indicator questions. So to be thorough, I've included Blogads Blog Readers (All) which includes the non-responders in the base as well as Blogads Blog Readers (Responders) which throws the non-responders out of the base.

First off, it's very obvious that Blogads Blog Readers (BBRs) are much closer to Influentials than they are to the rest of us plain folk.

Second, there are three categories that BBRs lag Roper's Influentials: Attended a public meeting on town or school affairs; Served on a committee for some local organization; and Served as an officer for some club or organization. What's the common thread? Yes, that's right – blog readers are NOT as active locally in the real world. Their activism is likely focused on larger geographies and administered virtually. Tom Friedman would be proud – the Blog Influential's Spiral of Influence is flat.

As I read The Influentials, I began to question the validity of their battery in the modern context. Shouldn't blogging, podcasting or actively maintaining a webpage count just as much as "Written a letter to the Editor of a newspaper or magazine or called a live radio or TV show to express an opinion" ? Why does group participation have to be "local"? For me, the Blogads Survey puts exclamation marks after those questions marks.

For these research geeks among you who are foaming at the mouth about statistical validity consider this – in one week, by sending out about 100 emails, Henry Copeland surveyed 30,079 consumers, found 21,000 Roperish Influentials and collected their demographics and opinions. Last year he surveyed 17,159 in a similar week. By this time next year, he'll have a tracking study. Oh, and he's been giving away the data for free.

Jeff Jarvis on BuzzMachine:

Why the hell would any sane person put a cell phone number on the internet?

And from Robert Scoble's Blog:

What do these market research, public relations, and marketing companies have in common?

CRM Metrix
ComBlu
Gfk NOP
Millward Brown
Starcom Worldwide
VoodooVox
Burson-Marsteller
Simmons
Start Sampling
comScore Networks
Decision Analyst
Nielsen//NetRatings
Brandimensions

They all presented at the recent WOMMA Conference in Chicago.

The all blathered on about Word-of-Mouth marketing – you know – get involved in the conversation, go to where your customers are talking about you, come up with some tools to measure stuff, blah, blah, blah, and oh BTW buy my expensive traditional research.

AND NONE OF THEM HAVE CORPORATE BLOGS!

I'm not sure that I'd be interested in taking, much less buying, WOM advice from anyone who doesn't eat their own dog food.

On the other hand, here is a list of blogs maintained by the other presenters. You know, the ones that practice what they preach, which is to say, the ones that are cluetrained.

WOMMA Womnibus
Burson-Marsteller's e-fluentials blog <--- Newly added, I originally missed this blog
BuzzMetrics Mouthpiece
Intelliseek Intelliblog
Intelliseek BlogWebinar
BIGresearch's When Customers Talk
Dr. Walter Carl's Word-of-Mouth Communication Study
Future Now's A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect
BzzAgent's Beelog
The Phelon Group's The Reference Steward^SM Blog
Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs
George Silverman's Word-of-Mouth Marketing Blog

Most of the slides from the presentations are available in PDF here on the WOMMA site. Some really good stuff that I hope to write about later. I'm particularly impressed with The Phelon Group's presentation and website – includes blog, forums, email subscriptions, white papers, etc. Very professional, good example of doing everything right.

And some negative examples...

CRM Metrix slides have a footer that says "Contents may not be shared with any parties outside client and CRMMetrix without written permission." Uhhh, HELLO, this is posted on a public website for the freakin' WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING ASSOCIATION. The cat may be out of the bag.

Jon Berry's slides are labeled "Proprietary and Confidential". Hmmmm. About that word confidential – in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya - "You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means." Not don't worry, not many folks are using this new fangled Internet thing yet.

Seriously folks, especially those of your talking about blogs, you really must be present to win. If your expect you customers to buy into this stuff, shouldn't you?

UPDATE: I originally overlooked Burson-Marsteller's e-fluentials blog. Thanks to Jonathan Carson, BuzzMetrics Mouthpiece for pointing this out. My sincerest appologies to Idil Cakim.
More of this conversation here, here and here.

On the drive home from my recent vacation, I listened to several podcasts about energy and related stuff– the US's lack of an energy policy, the delay and potential inadequacy of Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, the impact of China and other emerging markets on the availability of oil, etc. As a father this all is pretty disturbing for me. This is compounded by living in Tulsa, Oklahoma – where it sometimes feels that everyone believes that Americans are entitled to to first dibs on the world's resources and the rest of the world gets what's left because they were too stupid to be born here; and besides oil is a limitless resource and anyone who says different is a communist.

For those of you reading this from one of the coasts or else where in the world, I assure you this is unfortunately without exaggeration.

So, being a pragmatic optimist I started looking for the silver lining and came across some really interesting stuff...

Wired Magazine has a great article about Bill Gross' (of Idealab fame) latest venture Energy Innovations. Their first product, shipping in limited quantities by the end of 2005, is a 25 mirror array solar concentrator, dubbed the Sunflower, that will be light enough to install on flat industrial rooftops of power-starved California. 750 units at an estimated cost of $228,000 will provide 90% of the power needed to run a 35,000 square foot light-manufacturing facility. This system would save $52,000 in annual electrical costs, paying for itself in 5 years. If they are successful with this market, residential units may one day be available.

From the July 12, 2005 edition (podcast) of the This Week in Science, I learned about Earthship Biotecture. a Taos, New Mexico is a architectural design firm specializing in environmentally friendly, self-sustaining houses. Be sure to check out their image gallery and Buy an Earthship page which features a 10,000 ft² Earthship near Telluride, Colorado for $4M. Monthly utility bill – about $50.

Then there's this article from Engadget on hacking the Toyota Prius to be plug powered.

Finally, there's this Science Friday/Ira Flatow interview with The World is Flat author Tom Friedman. Lot's of insightful energy discussions. If you're reasonably unconcerned about a global oil shortage you should listen to this podcast. You should listen anyway though because it's terribly interesting. That Tom guy is kinda smart.

With recent (and sad) passing of James Doohan, we need to start thinking about someone other than Montgomery Scott to come up with more power.

Wow, there's been a lot of great discussion about my recent post Discovering Blog Influentials. It's been discussed by Hether Green at BusinessWeek Online's Blogspotting, Rex Hammock at RexBlog, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dina Metha at Conversations with Dina, Mitch Ratcliffe at RatcliffeBlog, TSMI's Trade Show Marketing Report, Melanie Isaac, Fritz at Curch SEO, Jason Timmermans at Echo Generation and, of course, by Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion.

I'm anxious to explore this idea further and start discussing exactly how we might go about identifying Influentials. In reading the comments and discussions around this topic, I think it might be equally important to better define Blog Influentials. I see a lot of confusion and false assumptions here - even on my part. But alas, I'm traveling and probably won't have time until next week to really delve.

But in the mean time, I would like to point everyone to a recent post about Influentials on BuzzMetrics' blog. They ask the tough question - "Roper's Influentials are still alive and well - but do they matter?" This is a really interesting question.

Another point I want to explore - Berry & Keller's Influentials are clearly early indicators for coming trends (30 years of research shows this). Is our assumption that Influentials catalyze the trend that follows their early adoption a false one - they might simply be an early indicator because they find new stuff and discover the benefits before the rest of us - but they may not actually influence our adoption. If this is the case "Influentials" might be a misnomer that skews all of our discussions in the wrong direction. More to come on this when I get home.

Intro to The Influentials

I've been reading the book The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy by Jon Berry and Ed Keller. This book is based on 30+ years of market research and presents the concept of The American Influential. The basic idea is that there are a simple set of survey questions that serve as a litmus test for identifying Influentials – a group of about 10% of the American population. These Influentials act as stunningly accurate bellwethers for all kinds of stuff like technology adoption and value trends. It's very interesting and compelling stuff.

Bloggers and Influentials

While the idea of some people being “influential” is not terribly unique – this is what Seth Godin calls sneezers and Malcolm Gladwell subdivides into connectors, mavens and salesmen – Berry and Keller go beyond simply musing about the idea. They prove that these Influentials are quantifiable and identifiable, and demonstrate how.

As I read Berry and Keller's description of the Influential, I can't help but notice the similarities to bloggers (or at least the ones that I read – primarily professionally focused and/or motivated who provide editorial insights in addition to links, etc.) In fact, by virtue of blogging, bloggers exhibit several influential characteristics like being connected with many people, being technologically literate, having active minds, trendsetting, and belief in growth and change. There are other characteristics that I also see in the bloggers that I read. For example, Influentials are focused on family. In the last week we've heard stories from Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra (followed up here), Jeff Jarvis and Robert Scoble (mp3 podcast with his son Patrick) that illustrate their family focus.

I constantly have to remind myself that this book was written in 2002 – before blogs had any significant public awareness or momentum – it is not about bloggers and doesn't even mention the word “blog” (or “web log”) - yet, without every using the word, it screams BLOGGERS.

I was particularly struck by this quote...

Getting through to the Influentials is not easy. They're hard to reach. They are among the most critical citizens and consumers in the society. They hold business to higher standards, are harder to persuade, see through hype more easily, and drive a harder bargain than the average American.

Hmmm. This easily could've been written by someone at Dell about Jeff Jarvis. Sure it's easy to email Jeff Jarvis and he will probably even respond, but try to change his mind. Can you imagine this conversation, “Hi Mr. Jarvis, this is Dell and we're listening now...” Dell would just be setting themselves up for another 3 or 4 weeks of ridiculing posts.

Certainly Jeff's not the only critical one. Steve Rubel has started to spot Vigilante Marketing blogs. Speaking of Steve Rubel, he's jointed Mr. Jarvis and switched from Microsoft to an Apple and has mentioned it prominently, if politely, on his blog. Each of these guys have thousands of people reading their posts everyday. This brings comfort to Geoffrey Moore's early majority and speeds chasm crossing. This, in part, is what makes them Influentials.

Then there is this gem...

Knowing what [Influentials are] talking about and where they influence opinions in the society doesn't mean an advertising copywriter will be able to speak persuasively. In fact, without a broader understanding of Influentials, such as their expectations of business, the copywriter will likely have a very difficult time.

This is important. Bloggers, at least those that are indeed Influentials, are difficult to reach through advertising! This is why I think RSS Ad Sense, cookies in RSS feeds and similar nonsense is, well, nonsense. Blogs are a customer driven conversation. If a blogger allows commercial interest to unnaturally interfere she loses credibility. If companies think blogs are important, then they should respect the bloggers and listen, optionally engage intelligently and individually – but they shouldn't try to persuade through advertising, as the old joke goes, it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Okay, Some Bloggers Might Be Influentials, So What?

In my experimentation with BlogPulse, and my recent discussion of the base, I've begun imagining a new blog trending tool (or the evolution of an existing one, hint, hint), one designed to listen to bloggers that are also Influentials, or what I'm going to start calling Blog Influentials.

So what would a Blog Influential trend tool like? It would have to have a way to set the base to be known Influentials within the area of interest – instead of a doomed to fail attempt at the whole blogosphere.

Let's outline a hypothetical example.

A report published early last year by the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet of the Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University, together with RoperASW (employer of Berry and Keller) and Nielsen//NetRatings titled Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Presidential Campaign concludes that “Online Political Citizens Are Influentials.” Knowing this, a political campaign might use blog trend data from blogs identified as “Online Political Citizens” aka Blog Influentials to glean insights and spot trends earlier.

Do blogs contain this type of political trend data? Can it be mined from blogs? Natalie Glance over at Intelliseek and Lada Adamic of HP Labs wrote a paper titled The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog that make a strong case indicating yes – on both counts. This report was looking retrospectively at the presidential campaign to validate the idea – but there is no reason the same techniques couldn't be used to look forward.

So imaging a blog aggregator sucking feeds from say 1,000 political blogs written by folks identified as “likely Blog Influentials”. Now, we trend – no spam, no new blogs added (unless prequalified). Voila, instant-up-to-the-minute Influential insights focused on our topic of interest.

Market Research of the Future

The interesting thing here is that the IPDI at George Washington U conducted 1,392 online surveys and 1,029 RDD sampled national telephone surveys to confirm their findings. This is expensive market research as is only a snapshot of the respondents views. Comparitively speaking, blog aggregation can be very inexpensive – especially if companies like BlogPule and IceRocket continue to improve their trending tools and/or provide access to low cost aggregated data sets. Perhaps more importantly, monitoring Blog Influentials can provide continuous data.

In the future market researchers may call Intelliseek, Technoratti, IceRocket or BlogLines to buy six months worth of political Blog Influential posts, or Female 18-25 Blog Influential posts, or Blog Influentials who have mentioned iPods at least once in the last six months, etc. in much the same way they buy targeted sample lists today. Another product might be just the list of feed addresses (in OPML or some such) for a particular demographic. The researcher could then create their own aggregator, indexes, searchers and trend data. This would eliminate the bias introduced by indexing techniques selected by the blog data vendor – like the removal of English noise words.

Conclusions

It's worth noting that this is example where the size of the whole blogosphere doesn't matter. All that matters is whether there are enough Blog Influentials within our topic of interest. Without looking, I know that we have enough for politics, technology, teens, business, blogging and marketing. According to the MIT Weblog Survey, female bloggers outnumber their male counterparts 7 to 4 so maybe blogs are a good source of female Influentials.

So to summarize:

(good) bloggers = Influentials

To stay ahead of the curve:

1. Find your Blog Influentials.

2. Listen.

3. Repeat step 2.

So how exactly do we identify Blog Influentials, well, that's another post. And to those of you who still think that no one reads blogs I have two points: 1) You're reading this and it's a blog and 2) even people that have never heard of blogs read blogs.

Yesterday in Stop the Blog Statistic Madness! I touched on something I've been meaning to blog about for a while now – your base. I'm not talking about the base of the classic game Zero Wing, I'm talking about the base in the market research sense. For those not privy to the secret vocabulary of market researchers, base is a not-so-fancy word for denominator when calculating percentages of the occurrence of a particular characteristic or response in a sampling of people.

To help illustrate this let's look at an example. Let's say you conduct a political survey by telephone by calling 1,000 registered voters in a particular county and ask them who they are going to vote for in an upcoming election, Mr. Berry or Mr. Kush. Let's say the results of the survey are as follows:

313 Respondents say they are voting for Mr. Berry
397 Respondents say that are voting for Mr. Kush
290 Respondents say that they are undecided

Now, if the election were held on the day that the survey was conducted, who would you say has the advantage? The right answer is whose ever campaign is paying for the survey and the reason is the base.

If the Berry campaign commissioned the survey, they might issue a press release stating “Kush carries less than 40% of voters”. This obviously misleads the reader into the false assumption that Berry is carrying over 60% of voters. In this case the Berry campaign uses all of the survey respondents in the base.

(397 Kush voters / 1000 respondents in the base = 39.7%).

The Kush campaign on the other hand, might report “over 55% of voters support Kush”. In this case, the Kush campaign wants to underplay the magnitude of the undecided vote so they remove the undecided voters from the base.

(397 Kush voters / (1000 respondents – 290 undecideds) = 55.9%)

For marketers, advertisers and market researchers, base definition is equal parts art and science. While the above example is a jab at the questionable practices of modern political campaigns, limiting the base to a particular subgroup of respondents is often valid or even essential to produce meaningful results. If our survey was commissioned by a non-partisan organization, the reported results might look like this:

55.9% of decided registered voters say they will vote for Kush
44.1% of decided registered voters say they will vote for Berry
29% of registered voters say they are undecided

Here we see the base clearly defined for the reader (i.e. “of decided registered voters”). Sometimes, as in this case, it is useful to change the base depending on what question you are trying to answer. Once this idea seeps into your brain, you should start confronting every percentage statistic with the magic base question: “Of what?”

Okay, quiz time. According to BlogPulse, on July 13, the word “mortgage” was included in one half of one percent of blog posts.

Did you ask “of what?” Good. You passed. So what's the answer? Here the base contains every blog post that BlogPulse collected and indexed on July 13 including all of the blog spam, all non-English blogs, all link blogs, all the garbage that somebody stuffed into an RSS feed that day and shoveled into BlogPulse. For searching this is okay – not optimal – but okay. For market research it is abysmal. In our political survey example we called only registered voters in the geography of interest. What would the results had been if we called 1,000 people from all over the world regardless of age or voting status? Certainly less meaningful. Yet this is what we tend to do with the blogosphere.

Other than vanity or novelty why would anyone what to measure the percent mention of a particular term of EVERYTHING collected by BlogPulse (or any other search engine)? I can't think of any.

What is valuable is what the casual user thinks they get from BlogPulse, namely, a base that includes only legitimate blogs in their native language. What we need from BlogPulse (or anyone else who implements trending) is the ability to define the base in addition to our search term. There are lots of base definitions that I'd like to used given the opportunity. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• Language – of all English blogs

• Age of Blog – of all blogs that are at least six months old and have posted within in the last 30 days

• Blog Host – of all Blogger blogs, of all Live Journal blogs

• Geography – of all blogs in Oklahoma, of all blogs in the UK

• Demographics – of all blogs written by women between the ages of 25 and 45

• Blog Status – of the Technorati 100, of all TTLB Crawly Amphibians

• Blog Type – of all personal blogs, of all commercial blogs

• Blog Focus – of all political blogs, of all technology blogs

In reality, you'd almost always want to combine one or more of these but the point is that you should never want to measure all of the blog post on the planet – at least not for the purpose of market research. Think back to my “decline of god” discussions. If we were to use English language non-spam blogs as a base, I don't think we would see a decline in “god” – or at least one substantially less dramatic. For almost everything, it is meaningless at best and misleading at worst to use the whole blogosphere are your base. Unfortunately, this is all that BlogPulse – or anyone else I know of - currently offers (at least for free). BlogPulse is saying “All your base are belong to us.” ...er, so to speak.

[DISCLAIMER: I don't want to beat up BlogPulse here, as I've said before, their service is remarkable and generous and they are way ahead of anyone else with their Trend feature. Internally they perform these types of base adjusted analysis for paying customers (I gather but not from direct experience). ]

With all of the hoopla about Google Ad Sense for RSS and the jockeying for the right to proclaim “we index more worthless RSS fed SPAM than anyone else” I think we're missing the point. The value of the blogosphere to commercial interests is not finding a new way to be heard but discovering a new way to listen.

If you are thinking about measuring impressions of RSS feeds – you're looking in the wrong end of the telescope. Blogs are a feedback mechanism. Bloggers are bellwethers. By monitoring the blogosphere, you can measure the effectiveness of marketing but blogs themselves are not good marketing channels in the traditional sense – if it looks like advertising no one will subscribe.

So how do we listen? We listen by finding and measuring the blogs that represent our customers or our potential customers. The other 13.98 million blogs that BlogPulse and Technorati are tracking don't matter – they just muck up the base. Sure, companies need to blog – but the focus should be on catalyzing the conversation, not dictating it. It has been said recently that the blogosphere is a focus group – when's that last time you'd tried to advertise in a focus group?

There are people blogging about your company right now. Find them and listen. And forget the other 13.something million.

Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion blogged today that post/day being the stat to watch to measure the growth of the blogosphere. I'm not so sure that it's that simple. As Steve mentioned, and as we've explored here, blog spam is on the rise. You add to this fact that the major blog search engines are all in somewhat of an arms race at the moment – all trying to become the next Google or Yahoo! In this regard, it is in the search engines' best interest to collect the most posts from the most blogs – no matter the quality. Another problem with this perspective is that we all agree that one post wonders shouldn't really count as “blogs” but we are still prepared to count their posts.

The reason we are all trying to estimate the size of the blogosphere is to should credibility or viable as a new media. We try to show sustained growth to prove to traditional media that this is a trend and not a fad. I for one think it is time to simply accept that blogs are real and significant – like we've done with the traditional web and turn our focus to trying to measure the impact, the effect or the influence of the blogosphere. How many six month old, 1 year old, 2 year and 3 year old live blogs are out there. These numbers would be unaffected by one post wonders and spam blogs that tend to be in operation for a very short time.

If we all think blogs are real and significant, let's measure them accordingly instead of trying to sensationalize the statistics.

By way of Dr. B...

Just wanted you to know that they are having an open casting call to the Amazing Race on July 20th from 7am to 2pm at the new Jenks Riverwalk. Both people in the team have to be present for the 2 minute video audition. You're supposed to bring the completed application that you can download from the KOTV channel six website. Didn't know if you'd be back in town for it, but wanted to let you know about it.

Thanks! Unfortunately we won't be back in town but would LOVE to tryout. Maybe someone else out there might be interested.

Yesterday I finally fired up iTunes 4.9 to see what all the hoopla was about. I was prepared for a reasonably steep learning curve, but about 3 minutes later I had subscribed to my first podcast and with in an hour I had downloaded 1.5 days of solid podcast content. I am currently subscribed to 23 podcasts, most of which I've download all of their available content (backcasts ?). I have 2.7 days of content occupying 1.6GB of hard disk space waiting to be sync with my iPod. When new episodes are released for any of these 23 feeds, iTunes downloads them for me automatically. This is really cool.

Since I'm still in discovery/experimentation mode, I've tried to scoop up tidbits from all along the long tail. I'm subscribe to The Al Franken Show, CNN News, Science @ NASA, Ghostly Talk, Rocketboom, How to Do Stuff and YACK – The Nantucket Online Community. It's more work than satellite radio but it's time shifted and the volume of content is staggering.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm though. Mark Cuban recently wrote about podcasting being the new streaming audio (in a bad a way). I think he has some points –

You see, there are no hit's on the Internet... Podcasting is hot. Pod casting is cheap and easy. Podcasting can be fun. Creating your own podcast and trying to make a business out of it is a mistake.

But I also think he's missing some key differences.

• Podcasting is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than streaming audio in the '90s.

• With Apple's new iTunes 4.9 being free and cross-platform podcasting is headed for the mainstream – it's not being driven by startups unknown to the general public over technology that's inaccessible to the "everyman".

• Broadband penetration today is huge. Not that it matters, podcasting is less dependent on bandwidth than was streaming.

• And perhaps most importantly, podcasting works.

So, download iTunes 4.9 and decide for yourself.