Measure the quality, too!

For Article: Blogs: Popularity Doesn't Equal Influence
Posted by Jane Abao 11/23/2006 12:24:55 PM

How do you measure authority just from blog linking? I don’t think solely depending on quantitative approaches is enough because of the nature of information. The content should be given credit which in fact, should have prior acknowledgement over and above frequency of linking.

You are right about people linking to blog postings in order to question, disagree with, refute, or even ridicule them. In fact, all my linkings go under this category. The reason I link them is to show to the reader what I am contending with and most of them time, my arguments come because I disagree with the contents. I have one blog dedicated to this, in fact.

At best, a good approach to measuring authority is a mixed approach both quantitative and qualitative where the qualitative is nested in the more predominating quantitative. Content analysis can serve the greater part of the qualitative where themes of the usual good writing qualities should be considered. And for tips on what to look for here, I recommend looking up the Poynter editors.