Measuring Your Blog'S Outcomes and Use of Other Social Media Tools

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Measuring Your Blog'S Outcomes and Use of Other Social Media Tools
Discussion of the idea of evaluating the effectiveness of blogs, and in particular, a set of metrics from Avinesh Kaushik:

• "Raw Author Contribution (posts and words in post)
• Unique Blog Readers (content consumption - Unique Visitors and Feed Subscribers)
• Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
• Technorati "Authority" (measuring your impact on the world!)
• Cost (what!)
• Return on Investment (what's in it for you/your business)"

Would this newsletter be twice as good if I wrote twice as many posts or wroite them twice as long? If I wrote about a more popular topic - educational policy, say - I would have more readers. Would that be better? Is Will Richardson better than me because he gets more comments? Am I better than you because I have a higher Technorati rank? Would it be better if I made money and spent less on my website?

Measuring "your blog's outcome" is ridiculous. It's like measuring 'friendship'. measuring 'reflective moments'. More...