Is ''Tail'' a Metric of Blogpost Quality?

 posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at 8:18 pm MST

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AlphaDawg AT DreamHost

In my previous post " Birthing the Ultimate Feed Reader" I mentioned the “river” versus “folder” RSS discussion in the Scobleizer blog and wrote, "what something is worth depends on how much of it there is and how fast it's moving". In what I do I'm challenged to manage whole families of technical documents (herding cats, yes?) while attending to minute details, even while things are in flux (hence "nailing jello to the wall"). So finding axes of differentiation / categorization (semantic web anyone?) is something I worked on before WWW came into being.

So the notion of a quality metric that manifests as ?what? longevity ... seems to me that has face validity. TailRank.com operates on such a supposition: that the number of branches springing from a post represents some quality. I'll buy that.

I just spliced some TailRank output into my frankenstein homepage (see the link above) ... turns out to be good reading!

From my list of something over 200 blogs I've requested that TailRank filters out those that have more than 25 ?what? spawned threads. Koolio. Really.

 

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This just in: "IT Gets Drafted to Babysit the Blogs, by David L. Margulius at InfoWorld.

"I don't have time to read Weblogs. There, I said it. I'm not saying the blogosphere's emperor has no clothes. I'm just trying to be realistic about how much time I can spend in life reading other people's musings. According to the latest Jupiter Research study, however, I may be bucking an unstoppable trend.
Nearly 70 percent of all large companies will have deployed a Weblog authoring system by the end of this year [...]
The immediate upshot, says Jupiter, is that IT needs to "figure out how to leverage existing Web content management best practices and functionality [...]" These best practices include workflow, single-source content repositories, security and permissions, and content auditing and analytics.
But on another level, I wonder whether there's a bigger picture that IT should be thinking about."

Good that the InfoWorld crew is wondering about it ... very timely!

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