An interesting perspective on metrics from Stowe Boyd.
While working at Corante I had the opportunity to peer at the stats for all sorts of blogs that we had going. And one thing that became really obvious is that sucessful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: The ratio between posts and comments+trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks) was less than one. Meaning that there was more conversation — as indicated by the number of comments and track backs offered by readers — than posting articles. I will call this the Converation Index just to put a handle on it
A low index suggests more conversations, a high index suggests more ranting, less discussion.
It’s a fun metric, and I’m sure Stowe intends it to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Stowe reckons his conversation index is 80 posts divided by 102 (comments and trackbacks) = 0.784.
FWIW, mine is 1198 posts divided by 1706 comments and 472 trackbacks – 1198/2178 = 0.55. Not too bad.
(For the pedants, I actually have some static pages on this site which are not blog entries and they’re excluded from this calculation).
