A Portuguese translation of How do you measure a blog’s success? is now available here.

Over at Press Gazette you’ll find my latest article on using social bookmarking for journalism - split into three areas: managing cuttings; sourcing information; and publishing. Let me know if you have any personal experiences with bookmarking services - are there better services than Delicious?

See this video and respond on Seesmic

I’ve recently been playing with Seesmic once again, having briefly dabbled with an alpha invite a few months ago and stupidly written it off as a vague video blogging platform.

It isn’t.

It’s social.

And I think that’s very important.

Seesmic is, for me, a symptom of how media is changing. It is a symptom of how video has become as inexpensive and disposable as email. It is a symptom of a generation of people who are completely comfortable with visual media, and how they are rewriting that grammar.

It is also a new and important part of the personal distributed media ecosystem that we are gathering around us, and which stretches from a person’s Facebook profile to their Twitter account, their blog, and Flickr and YouTube accounts. Just as not everyone is on Flickr, not everyone will end up on Seesmic, but many will, and you’ll need to know how to talk to them.

But don’t mistake Seesmic for another YouTube. Seesmic is to YouTube what Twitter is to blogging. Key to this is the fact that Seesmic works with your Twitter account - so that new Seesmic posts are cross-posted on Twitter, and video replies are even cross-posted @ the other person’s name (allowing you to discover them on Twitter). And I wouldn’t be surprised to see it integrated with other social media platforms in the future.

Finally, it is an expression of the intimate, personal nature of web video, and how that is a world apart from the impersonal, broadcast nature of television. If you’re involved in communicating the news in any way, you need to learn the language of web video, and Seesmic provides a perfect space to do so.

And it’s for all of these reasons that journalists should try it out.

But this recommendation comes with a number of caveats:

• Firstly, Seesmic is very much in the early adopter phase. For this reason it is good for social networking if you’re in the technology field, but not great if you want opinions or feedback from anyone else, so don’t expect amazing results, and I wouldn’t recommend spending huge amounts of time on it. But the user base will change, and being there now will make a difference as it grows. Just ask people who’ve been blogging or twittering for longer.
• Secondly, being video, Seesmic as a whole is not searchable - and the user search is pretty poor, as it only searches usernames and not profiles (I’m onlinejournalist, by the way). Phil Campbell has created this website which allows you to search titles and authors. This means you can’t scan-read it, it means search engines will not index it as well as text, and it means accessibility issues. But video search is improving all the time, so again expect this to change.
• Thirdly, Seesmic currently lacks the sort of support enjoyed by bigger players such as YouTube. So whereas WordPress.com-hosted blogs will allow you to embed YouTube video, most WordPress bloggers will not be able to embed Seesmic video (there is, however, a plugin for WordPress.org hosted blogs). It’s for this reason that I’ve recorded my video blog about Seesmic on… YouTube. Ouch.
• Likewise, your video is normally recorded straight to Seesmic, so you have no backup copy and no way of getting one unless you use an FLV ripper.
• And the site doesn’t appear to tell you how many views you’ve had, which isn’t great for persuading people that this is a valuable way of, for example, distributing news. And it doesn’t allow for responses from non-Seesmic users, which reduces its interactivity (although you could tweet the person that’s not intuitive).
• Finally, it’s worth noting the usual blurring of public-private boundaries. Journalists using material on Seesmic should bear in mind the lessons of Virginia Tech etc. - just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s yours.

These are still early days, though. Crunchbase’s entry on Seesmic promises that:

“In the future, seesmic users will be able to record skype conversations, video and chat. seesmic will incorporate RSS feeds for individual users similar to Facebook’s newsfeed. Finally, [founder] Lemur sees seesmic partially becoming a crowdsourced Online TV with the most popular producers receiving revenue share.”

What do you think? Do you see other potential? Have you found it useful yourself? Come on, give us a comment. (or respond on Seesmic)

UPDATE: Alison Gow posted a video response on Seesmic, making the excellent point that Seesmic allows for a better interview experience - using the analogy of how face-to-face interviews are always better than telephone interviews. It’s a great point. She also suggests that it might work well for debates and conversation alongside news articles and issues.

The great thing about Seesmic is the way it breaks down barriers - people seem to feel more comfortable and confident, somehow, sending a stranger a video reply based on their video post than they would sending an @reply in Twitter, I would say because of the implicit intimacy of web video.

Skoeps.nl, a citizen-journalism venture, closed down last week after its owners declared it unprofitable. The business plan seemed simple enough to succeed:

1. Find loads of money,
2. Advertise massively, and
3. Share advertising and syndication revenue with writers.

The plan worked, except that there wasn’t enough revenue to share. Skoeps cash-flow was in the black, which means that, if investors refused to go forward, growth must have been minimal and could not have offset the initial investment in the near future.

They planned on giving €500,000 away to contributors in 2008. Despite what should have been a market-killing proposition, they failed to come up with compelling content and raise their game to the level of the national, widely-known media brands.

Among the reasons why people become journalists, ‘to save the world’ probably ranks first, closely followed by ‘to fulfill my attention deficit disorder’. Only at the very bottom will you find ‘to earn big bucks’. In all likelihood, non-professional content producers (yes, that’s the politically correct term for ‘citizen-journalists’) think the same.

It seems that web-users will devote time and efforts to giving away content to a platform only if they have the promise of a large enough audience to listen to them. Poland’s leading citJ website, Wiadomosci24, and its contender Moje Miasto (My Town), are lead by the two main media groups, Polskapresse and Mecom. They both make intensive use of the synergies between pro and amateur, mass and specialized channels. Polskapresse, for instance, advertise the site in the group’s papers and promising contributors a space in the print edition.

Even pure players seem to follow this trend. Despite $10m in Series A funding, NowPublic still sees no need to pay writers. A debate on the site as to how to share advertising revenue was superbly ignored by the community. Only 8 writers took part in the conversation. Their deal with AP is their best USP.

When monetization comes into play, open-pricing is the best option. The average donation stands at $4 on average. Instead of working on increasing page views, writers would focus on increasing the give-through-rate, so that they will try to provide content the audience deems worthy.

Non-professional contributions only add value if they have a unique edge against the mass. John, 34, from Westmoreland, TN, writing about the Middle-East conflict is useless. The same user writing about the tornado is priceless. The BBC does that brilliantly with the discreet box they put at the end of hot stories.

That’s why Steve Boriss announced the end of citizen-journalism. Journalism will increasingly be a job of connecting and editing contributions from the right experts. Whether this will be better done by humans or by Google is another matter.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns.

Brazil correspondent Gabriela Zago looks at the variety of metrics for evaluating the popularity of blogs. A Portuguese language version of this is available here.

There are many ways to measure a website’s success. Some use a more quantitative approach, and others are more qualitatively based. You can say a weblog is popular for many reasons, such as:

• traffic (page views, visits, visitors),
• discussions (comments, trackbacks, linkbacks),
• position in search engines (page rank),
• readership (feed subscriptions, blogroll presence) and
• reputation (a more subjective approach, based on what people think of a website, and the qualifications of the person that writes for it).

If you obtain all that data and construct rankings based on these different types of information, chances are that not all blogs ranked will appear in the exact same position in each one of the ranks.

And there’s more: you get a high probability of being contested on the method you’ve chosen to rank all the sites. Since no rank is perfect, one partial solution is to analyze how websites behave when evaluating different aspects.

Let’s take Adrian Monck’s Top 10 UK Journalism Blogs based on Google Reader subscriptions. Last year, on November 7th, the ranking appeared as follows:

As of March 29th, including Adrian Monck’s blog, the results had changed as follows:

Google Reader subscriptions – it includes subscriptions using other Google products, like iGoogle and Orkut

The same methodology shows a different ranking. Things changed over time? Readership is a fluid concept?

There’s more. If you take these 11 weblogs and rank them based in other factors, the order changes drastically. First, let’s take a look on the ranking based on Bloglines subscriptions (all results based on March 29, 2008, and for a sum of all feed addresses founded for each weblog): subs

Bloglines subscriptions

Bloglines subscriptions

We can find some problems in measuring feed subscriptions… First, not all feeds results are publicly displayed – if you use FeedBurner, for example, you should opt-in to make them public.

Another problem is that, usually, a weblog has multiple feed addresses. Sometimes they ask readers to subscribe to a particular RSS feed, but other options are presented for those who try to add it directly to feed readers. So, measuring a weblog’s success based on only this information could be tricky…

A similar problem of having multiple feeds arises when we check the ranks for blogs that have changed their address recently. Inlinks are split into more than one address (and this is particularly interesting when the old content is duplicated into both addresses), which leads to a fragmentation of authority and positioning in rankings of all sorts.

However, it is relatively easy to regain popularity, especially if you promote your new address effectively. Technorati authority, for instance, only counts inlinks received within the last 6 months.

Really old inlinks aren’t taken into account when calculating a blog’s authority. The only thing that is lost are the dynamic links (links pointing to blog entries) that are lost. But they are only taken into account for a short time.

If you check onlinejournalismblog.com, onlinejournalismblog.wordpress.com and ojournalism.blogspot.com rankings, for example, you’ll see that the difference in rankings is very large from .com to .wordpress, and ever larger from .wordpress to .blogpost, or .com to .blogspot. It’s hard to imagine they were once the same blog.

And what if we check popularity among search engines? Google PageRank is calculated based on inlinks a webpage receives. For the same 11 blogs, results are as follows:

Google Page Rank

#	Blog	PageRank
1	Roy Greenslade	7*
1	Jemima Kiss	7*
2	Shane Richmond	6*
2	Robin Hamman	6
2	Andrew Grant-Adamson	6
2	Martin Stabe	6
2	Simon Waldman	6
2	Adrian Monck	6
3	Paul Bradshaw	5
3	Richard Sambrook	5
3	Seamus McCauley	5

Does this say much? Does it really matter to have a slightly higher chance to appear first in search engine results?

If we check Alexa rankings, we see something curious:

Alexa Rank

Weblogs located at traditional media websites (Like Guardian.co.uk) share the same rank as the root website – that’s why they appear first on the list.

But Technorati authority, for instance, seems to be calculated based on only the blog’s inlinks…

Technorati Authority – based on links from different blogs in the last 6 months

#	Blog	Authority
1	Jemima Kiss	602
2	Roy Greenslade	397
3	Paul Bradshaw	377
4	Shane Richmond	246
5	Robin Hamman	175
6	Adrian Monck	131
7	Martin Stabe	123
8	Richard Sambrook	107
9	Seamus McCauley	104
10	Simon Waldman	67
11	Andrew Grant-Adamson	40

The number of links pointing to a blog can vary a lot, too…

Google Results – links from any web page (which inclues, for example, links in a blogroll – that appears in every page of a blog)

#	Blog	Google Results
1	Roy Greenslade	4,520
2	Jemima Kiss	3,030
3	Martin Stabe	2,300
4	Robin Hamman	1,850
5	Adrian Monck	1,770
6	Paul Bradshaw	1,690
7	Richard Sambrook	1,360
8	Seamus McCauley	937
9	Shane Richmond	863
10	Andrew Grant-Adamson	860
11	Simon Waldman	808

The final list was calculated based on the aforementioned aspects (Bloglines subscriptions, Google Reader subscriptios, PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, Google Results and Google Blogsearch results).

Every time a blog position was #1 in one of those aspects, it got 10 points. 9 points for position #2, 8 points for #3, and so on. The results are a sum of these points. And yes, Guardian and Telegraph blogs have been privileged since their PageRank and Alexa Rank are calculated based on the root site.