where does it pick up feeds? The Blog I write gets picked up by Google Blog Search, technorati and is powered by Feedburner, but doesn’t appear in IceBucket.

Thank you so much for talking and offering suggestions. I have clearer understanding of the multi-faceted goals I am wanting to achieve.

Howard

To go even further, those link counts don’t give any sense of how a blogger is either popular, or influencial, in a topic area.

The only person who can really determine the authority of a blog is you, based upon the needs and context of your situation. I would never give away my own ability to assess for who has authority to anyone else, and especially not a link count. Link counts do not understand my need, the context of the blogger’s position in a topic community, nor does it comprehend that blogger’s ability to influence.

The tools can tell us conversatinal recency, frequency, and maybe breadth, and maybe even topical influence, but we’d be lucky to get depth. It’s an AI issue that hasn’t yet been solved.

I worked on this problem for several years, and developed a front end for this kind of data at UC Berkeley, to try to achieve the results you appear to be asking for, and I can say it’s a really hard problem. I’ve offered all my research and UI and usability work to several companies and projects, but no one has really built a scalable and deep service to do what you are asking.

mary

mary

The idea of authority is unrelated to the word as we use it in normal conversation. If you look for all the postings on the particular topic you want to find “authoritative” bloggers for, you would need to parse the results into several dimensions of data, including the actual number and frequency of postings on the topic, the number links to those postings (as compared to all the postings on the blog), and the way those postings shaped other sites’ discussion of the subject in order to approach “authority,” which is defined by the OED as: “the confidence resulting from personal expertise.”

At BuzzLogic, we use the word “influence,” because we think it better describes the role of the participant in a conversation. We look at all the features above, as well as traffic and other volumetric data, to determine which sites have short- and long-term influence on a conversation (by looking at only one day’s worth of data you will find something very different than looking over six months or years).

Authority is an easy way to aggregate postings about a topic, but it doesn’t take the PR or marketing professional very long to find that it is not helpful to really understanding who has shaped a conversation about the brand or topic they are monitoring.

And like Jeffrey, whom I cowrote that article he shamelessly plugged above, we’re figuring this out from a research perspetive by working on a form of rubric of not just a blog’s effectiveness but also to determine who really are the authorities rising about the noise.

This has been a topic I have been wanting to explore more deeply now that I have become more serious about blogs and their relationship to / as social media, so am glad you started this thread.

That’s the problem of popularity versus influence, and it points out a problem with Technorati for identifying influential bloggers. Measuring influence in the context of a specific topic gets into the proprietary tools (which I’m researching for my current project).

Our example for this exercise is one of the most visible brands in the world, so the non-relevant mentions make more noise in the results that most clients would expect. For a brand like Coke, the volume of mentions online would likely overwhelm the do-it-yourself approach. For a lower-profile client, search feeds are a good start (and see MonitorThis for a good shortcut to create the feeds, as well as more examples of what to monitor).

I would also echo Lloyd’s parting point, that the automated analysis is a starting point. It has to feed into a strategy for what you want to do with the information. Are you watching for adverse mentions to counter, are you looking for influencers to engage… ?

Then, as Lloyd says, it’s a case of monitoring this to see which sources emerge.

Netvibes has widgets for blog search, podcast search, image search and video search. I would set up a page with each of these widgets looking for ‘coca cola’ as in your example and see what comes through.

Then, I think it’s also important to recognise that the search tools can’t do it all for you, you have to look for patterns, for people who, say, post blogs *and* video and subscribe to them - it’s an iterative process of searching, subscribing, aggregating, following links, subscribing, doing a bit more search, writing yourself, meeting up with people, weeding your subscriptions, commenting, etc.