I'm not a big fan of blog stats
by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/11/04 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/11/04/488943.aspx
No, it's true -- I'm not a big fan of blog stats.
I mean, if I were doing this for the hit count or the comments or any of the usual reasons people seem to have, I would almost ceratinly being doing it differently....
Now I still feel that way, though I have been looking not at absolute numbers but at relative numbers, trying to glean some meaning.
Basically, I have been looking at the two counts that Community Server gives me, for every post:
- Web Views - page views of the post, viewed from a browser
- Agg Views - RSS "hits" – the page viewed from an aggregator of one type or another
It has been interesting to pay attention to:
- the differences between the posts that are higher in one count or the other
- posts that have that ratio change over time
- when/how the comment count seems to correlate with those results
I am still looking at some of the numbers, but I'll post some of my findings, eventually. It is the sort of thing that interests me, even if it does not interest you. :-)
# Jeff D. on 4 Nov 2005 11:31 AM:
Re: "It is the sort of thing that interests me, even if it does not interest you. :-) "
Well, that's what you're doing any of this for, right? You post about the things that interest you, which is what your blog /should/ be about. If you were only posting in your own blog to try and please your readers, you'd be wasting your own time. So yeah, who really cares about blog stats? It's the relationships you can find in them that are interesting.
# Michael S. Kaplan on 4 Nov 2005 11:57 AM:
Heh heh heh..... well Jeff, sometimes I do post things from mail or the suggestion box that I think may interest people here but about which I may not know as much.
But this stuff in particular may not interest people here, so I am self-consciously apologizing for my fetish in this case.... :-)
# Blake Handler on 5 Nov 2005 1:36 PM:
When you figure it all out, we hope you can divine a solution. Blog searching and “status” seemed to be more unruly than the differences between MSN, Google & Yahoo!
Since blogs popularity are based upon “traffic” and links from other blogs – there are “bogus” blogs setup to simply create an inordinate amount of links to the site you wish to “publicize”, these same “bogus” site continually post the SAME article so that it ALWAYS is listed as a new blog entry – thus driving more traffic to the blog you with to “publicize”.
Sites like BlogShares, PubSub, and Technorati all give different search returns – just like MSN, Google & Yahoo! Not an easy problem to solve. Good luck :-)
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