Blog Authority? Huhn?

Posted: December 7, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: the blogosphere, The Little Blog that could | Tags: , , , | 32 Comments

About a year or so ago, I decided to look into what made a blog successful or not successful.  Of course, a lot of this depends on the purpose of your blog.  If it’s only to share your photos and family news, then just getting your relatives and friends on line and with the program is enough.  If you’re selling something it’s another thing.  I watched a neighbor build a blog for a B&B, one for a small theater, and another for a Wine and Cheese delicatessen.  They were looking to reach and service new and existing customers.  Political and opinion blogs have a different goal and a somewhat different metric. Since we’re in that category, I’m going to share the methodology and metrics with you.  I also want to let you know why this interests me.

There are several places you can look to see how ‘seriously’ a blog is taken by the blogosphere.  Just recently, an academic study–yup, you know me– was done to create a Blogosphere Authority Index and you can find the results for political blogs here. You may recognize several of the blogs rated there including  Corrente. Lambert does a fine job at doing the things which create the atmosphere for a high rating for a political blog.  First, he makes sure his posts are relevant to the subject.  Second, he does a good job at getting links and ping backs from other blogs; especially those with higher ratings like, say Crooks and Liars. He makes comments and networks with other bloggers.  That particular referenced study looks at both left and right wing blogs.  I focused on the left wing or ‘progressive’ blogs.

There are several rating places that examine blogs.  They don’t really look at the ‘truthiness’ of the blog, but at how effective it is at attracting readers and links.  Technorati.com is probably the major one.   There’s also Alexa.  Alexa’s rating is the  measure that I mentioned a few weeks ago when I said we started out some where in the ranking world with a number approaching 12 million.  Our three month ranking stands today at 956,644 which includes only about 6 weeks of active blogging and interaction . The rest of the three month period basically relates to my using this site as a file cabinet for my economic/finance items.  If you just look at our last month’s traffic, then, you’ll see our 1 month rating is 383,450.  That’s a huge change and you’re part of it!!   Alexa goes on traffic or page views so it ranks how many people go to a blog.

Technorati has a different set up.  It rates a blog not only by overall standing, but by how well that blog attracts other blogs’ attention.  It also ranks you by different subject categories.  We’re really moving up in the U.S. political blog category. We now rank 257.  Just today, we went up 367 places.   Here’s that data.

257. Sky Dancing

https://dakiniland.wordpress.com
Recent: Julian Assange Arrested by Scotland …

U.S. Politics
Auth: 543
Moved positive places Change +367

Read more: http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/politics/uspolitics/page-11/#ixzz17U8pgsZU

Wonkette was on the same page, so I took a snapshot of their numbers for comparison. Wonkette has traditionally been a highly-rated progressive blog with an active community.

236. Wonkette

http://wonkette.com

Recent: So This Is What Compromise Looks …

U.S. Politics
Auth: 554
Moved negative places Change -2

Since we’re relatively new at this, we’re changing quite rapidly and may not settle into our true average for another month or two.   I’m going to refer back to a few links above to give you an idea of how blogs are evaluated so you know what the numbers I just gave you actually mean.  Here’s an explanation for Techonorati from bulletproof blog.

Launched several years ago as a blog search engine designed to simply aggregate and organize the global online conversation, Technorati.com has ultimately evolved into a full-fledged online indexing and rating service, providing data on authority and influence. Simply plugging in the name or address of a blog into the Technorati.com search bar will provide the blog’s authority score and ranking. The authority score, which identifies a blog’s level of influence in its specific genre, is based on traffic statistics, linking behavior, and its relevance to popular topics. A blog’s Technorati.com ranking indicates where a given blog ranks among the authority scores of all blogs. The ease and expediency of Technorati.com make it one of the first places that you should stop when evaluating the influence of a blog.

The BAI study–the academic one–that created a “Blogosphere Authority Index” has different methodology and you can find the explanation in a section of the paper published here.  The index attempts to blend a variety of different measures including influence.

This example is an illustration of four distinct areas of influence: network centrality, link density, site traffic, and community activity. To create a comprehensive ranking system, this paper identifies the best-available proxy for each of these types of influence, converts them to ordinal rankings, and then combines them into a single index of authority.

There is a score for site traffic (the number of people who visit a blog), the activity of the community (that would be the number of people that return to the blog and comment), and then there’s the interaction with other blogs through listings and pingbacks.  This isn’t just listing some one on your blog roll.  You have to actively quote the blog with an active link to it and your community needs to be interested enough in that link to go there.  The other blog also needs to reciprocate.  People that are really interested in bumping up their influence numbers have to go from blog to blog and actively get links and ping backs.

Other than academic curiosity–of which I have plenty–what does this mean? Well, one of the things it means is that your community and  your blog is recognized as part of a bigger and important discussion on things.  In this case, that would be the U.S. political area. It also means that when politicians are looking for focus groups or looking at how people feel about things, you’re included because your community and blog has numbers, authority, and peer-acknowledged information.

So, our little blog that could has made some important steps in the last 4 -6 weeks.  First, we’ve been linked to by Memorandum which is a site that lists political issues and blogs that discuss them.  They don’t do that for all blogs.  It’s a list that is followed by bloggers, the media, and politicians. Being linked there ups the exposure of the opinions here for both front pagers and down pagers.  It also means that we’re more likely to be read by others and linked to by others which, as I’ve stated, means we go up in authority and down in ranking.  (You want a high Technorati authority rating but a low ranking. You want to be 1000 on authority and less than 100 or ranking.  The 100 ranking or less says you’re in the top 100 blogs in that category.)

So, does this mean that all of us front pagers want to be the Big Orange Cheeto?  Well, speaking for me and just me,  HELL no!!  I don’t want a blog that has thousands of comments no one reads or can respond to and cares about.  So, that’s not my intent with following these things.  Oh, and you can follow these things too with the links I’ve given here and several buttons I stuck way down in the left hand corner of the leftmost column.  The deal is that in politics you want to be part of the conversation.  That happens only when you reach a certain point in these rating and ranking services.  They pay attention to who we all are.  This is especially true during election years.  If you were out and about in 2008 or before–as most of us were–you could tell who was important by how many folks would come and dump the meme du jour of whatever candidate on your message thread.  It was also pretty obvious that some politicians were interested in certain demographics and if they found it at any particular blog, they would actually read or follow that blog.

So, this is why I follow these metrics and mention them ever so often.  First, it assures me that we are doing a good job here, because it shows us where our readers come from, who they are, and how many of them there are reading us and returning to read us.  It’s a metric that can be used to measure if we’re meeting our goals of having a conversation that matters.  Second, it’s a metric that that measures if our conversations not only matter to us but, if they can make a difference in the bigger scheme of conversations.   I would like us to be a vehicle that some senator or congressman or governor could trip across.  Our numbers assure us a seat at some tables.

Any way, I hope I haven’t bored you with too many details, but this is why I’d like to celebrate that our three month Alexa traffic rating is good and our 1 month rating is outstanding.  More people are joining our conversation and our conversations are more likely to be read by people that could matter.

Bravo and brava!  Sky Dance on!!

Elizabeth Edwards: Mother, Lawyer, Advocate

Posted: December 7, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News | Tags: , | 38 Comments

Elizabeth Edwards has died after her long struggle with breast cancer.

Elizabeth Edwards, the political wife whose public battle with breast cancer, coping with marital infidelity and continued advocacy for the downtrodden raised her profile above that of her husband, died Tuesday, WRAL News has learned.

Edwards, 61, died at her Chapel Hill home, where family and friends had gathered in recent days after doctors informed her that her cancer had spread and recommended that she not undergo further treatment.

Edwards was first diagnosed with cancer in the waning days of the 2004 presidential campaign, when her husband, then-U.S. Sen. John Edwards, was the Democratic nominee for vice president. The couple didn’t disclose her illness until after the election.

The cancer went into remission after surgery and months of treatment, but it resurfaced in early 2007, as John Edwards was mounting a second run at the White House. The Edwardses agreed at the time that they wouldn’t allow the cancer to derail his candidacy.

Because the cancer had moved into her bones, her doctors said at that time that it was no longer curable but could be treated.

Notable Tweets:

marcambinder Marc Ambinder

Edwards family asking for donations to be made to Wade Edwards Learning Lab http://www.wade.org/

nytimes The New York Times

We just published the full obituary of Elizabeth Edwards. http://nyti.ms/gCmsBq

TheFix The Fix

Elizabeth Edwards’ obits (all worth the read): Times http://ht.ly/3lxQz, Raleigh N&O http://ht.ly/3lxRL, Politico http://ht.ly/3lxSj

thedailybeast The Daily Beast

Elizabeth Edwards Dies at 61: Jonathan Alter remembers her quiet nobility. http://thebea.st/fbbRJ0

Slate Slate

Elizabeth Edwards should have been the politician — a true missed opportunity. RIP http://slate.me/gKMETY

ThinkProgress has a thread up on ‘The Legacy of Elizabeth Edwards’ and her tireless advocacy of health care access for the poor.

ThinkProgress is devastated and heartbroken to hear that the health of our dear friend and colleague Elizabeth Edwards has deteriorated, as she wages her courageous battle against breast cancer. A long-time advocate of universal health care, Elizabeth transformed a personal medical tragedy into an instrument for social and political change after her initial diagnosis in November 2004. In the process, she gave voice to the millions of Americans who were left behind by our health system.

With her trademark courage, activism, and strong sense of justice, Elizabeth directly confronted the inequalities of the American health care system and the politicians who perpetuated them. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Elizabeth — a regular contributor to the Wonk Room throughout the health care reform debate and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress — took to our blog and challenged conservatives for releasing a health care plan that would have excluded millions of Americans who suffered from pre-existing or chronic conditions. “Why are people like me left out of your health care proposal,” Elizabeth asked Republicans, pointing out that market-based proposals would leave millions of Americans “outside the clinic doors” and allow insurance companies free reign to continue excluding sicker beneficiaries.

Update: We now have more statements and reactions to Elizabeth Edwards’ Death including ones from the President former President Bill Clinton, and SOS Hillary Clinton.

Statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

“I am deeply saddened by the passing of Elizabeth Edwards. America has lost a passionate advocate for building a more humane and just society, for reforming our health care system, and for finding a cure for cancer once and for all. But the Edwards family and her legion of friends have lost so much more — a loving mother, constant guardian, and wise counselor. Our thoughts are with the Edwards family at this time, and with all those people across the country who met Elizabeth over the years and found an instant friend–someone who shared their experiences and offered empathy, understanding and hope. She made her mark on America, and she will not be forgotten.”

Julian Assange Arrested by Scotland Yard

Posted: December 7, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Wikileaks | Tags: , | 24 Comments

Julian Assange

From The Independent UK:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s extradition unit today.

The 39-year-old Australian was held when he attended a central London police station by appointment.

He is now expected to appear before a district judge at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court later today.

As everyone knows by now, Assange faces rape and sexual molestation charges in Sweden.

The accusations have stalked Assange since the summer, before his website began publishing portions of the huge cache of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables that have dismayed American officials and other governments around the world in recent days.

But Assange, who is Australian, and his lawyers and supporters believe that the U.S. has pushed the sexual assault case behind the scenes as a way of embarrassing, harassing and silencing him.

Assange is believed to have been in southern England for much of the past few weeks as the State Department cables have been released. Swedish prosecutors last month issued an international warrant for his arrest, but British authorities did not move to arrest him until this week, apparently because of a technical mistake on the warrant.

At his court hearing, Assange’s lawyers are expected to ask for him to be released on bail while he fights the attempt to extradite him.

That legal battle could take weeks or even months. Assange’s attorneys fear that a successful extradition to Sweden on the sexual assault allegations could also make it easier for him to be extradited to the United States if prosecutors there charge him with various offenses relating to the WikiLeaks disclosures.

According to The Guardian UK, Wikileaks will continue releasing documents from its cache of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

The whistleblowers’ website has made arrangements to continue publishing the classified documents, the airing of which has embarrassed the US government. The leaked cables have provided a daily flow of revelations about the superpower’s involvement in the most sensitive issues around the world, including those affecting Iran, Afghanistan and China.

The decision to press on will help allay fears among Assange’s supporters that his arrest would hobble the organisation’s work.

Assange has also pre-recorded a video message, which WikiLeaks is due to release today. But the Guardian understands the organisation has no plans to release the insurance file of the remaining cables, which number more than 200,000. It has sent copies of the encrypted file to supporters around the world. These can be accessed only by using a 256 digit code.

In one piece of good news for Wikileaks and its supporters, a French judge has resisted pressure from France and the U.S. to shut down the organization’s website.

update 1

[MABlue here]
This whole development was predictable. Once the US got thoroughly embarrassed on the world stage through “Cablegate”, it was certain he was not going to freely roam around.
Julian Assange Becomes the US’s Public Enemy No. 1

He may be on the short list for Time magazine’s “person of the year,” but many Americans consider Julian Assange to be a criminal and a terrorist. The WikiLeaks founder has been fighting a battle on several fronts since the publication of the diplomatic cables. He has now been arrested in London.

[…]

London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that Assange had been arrested at around 9:30 a.m. local time, by appointment at a police station in the British capital. “He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010,” the statement read. Assange was due to appear before a London court later on Tuesday

update 2

[Dkat here]

If you want to know some background on these charges, you can check on the Daily Mail: ‘The Wikileaks sex files: How two one-night stands sparked a worldwide hunt for Julian Assange’.  It’s a bit of a pot boiler, but you probably should read it.

Using a number of sources including leaked police interviews, we can begin to piece together the sequence of events which led to Assange’s liberty being threatened by Stockholm police rather than Washington, where already one U.S. politician has called on him to executed for ‘spying’.

The story began on August 11 this year, when Assange arrived in Stockholm.

He had been invited to be the key speaker at a seminar on ‘war and the role of the media’, ­organised by the ­centre-Left Brotherhood Movement.

His point of contact was a female party official, whom we shall refer to as Sarah (her identity must be ­protected because of the ongoing legal proceedings).

An attractive blonde, Sarah was already a well-known ‘radical feminist’. In her 30s, she had travelled the world following various fashionable causes.

While a research assistant at a local university she had not only been the protegee of a militant feminist ­academic, but held the post of ‘campus sexual equity officer’. Fighting male discrimination in all forms, including sexual harassment, was her forte.

Glenn Greenwald has an op-ed up on this at Salon: ‘ Anti-WikiLeaks lies and propaganda – from TNR, Lauer, Feinstein and more’. He challenges some fabrications in the right wing press on charges that Wikileaks is endangering intelligence operations.

I understand that the media has repeated over and over the false claim that WikiLeaks “dumped” all 250,000 diplomatic cables on the Internet — which is presumably how this falsehood made its way into Gitlin’s brain and then into his column — but that’s no excuse for him and TNR editors failing to undertake the most minimal due diligence (such as, say, checking WikiLeaks’ website) before publishing this claim.

I imagine more news and reaction will be coming on this story today. We can use this post as a live blog for updates. Please let us know if you hear anything new.

Tuesday Reads

Posted: December 7, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , | 50 Comments

Barack Obama communes with the ghost of Herbert Hoover

Good Morning!!

I just have one question this morning. Does President Obama read? If he does, there is no way he could miss the fact that he has blown his chance for a second term. Back in January, he told Diane Sawyer:

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,”

Sorry Barack, you’re not even going to be a mediocre one-term president. You’re working on being Herbert Hoover II. You’re destroying the country, and a lot of people are waking up to that reality and beginning to ask how on earth we can get rid of you. Some cases in point:

Norman Solomon, Huffpo:

For the Obama presidency, moral collapse has taken on the appearance of craven clockwork, establishing a concentric pattern — doing immense damage to economic security at home while ratcheting up warfare overseas.

By the end of the weekend, a deal was just about wrapped up between the president and Republican congressional leaders to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

On the spin-cycle agenda this month is yet more reframing of the president’s foggy doubletalk about Afghanistan. Strip away the carefully crafted verbiage and the picture is stark — with plans for a huge U.S. war effort in that country for many years to come.

At the end of a year with massive U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan, parallels with the Johnson administration’s unhinged Vietnam War are hard to miss. Conjectures about an inside-the-Democratic-Party challenge to Obama’s re-nomination are now moving from shadowy whispers to open discourse.

Clarence B. Jones, Scholar in Residence, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University (H/T Wonk the Vote) Time to Think the Unthinkable: A Democratic Primary Challenge To Obama’s Reelection You need to read the whole thing, but here’s just a sample:

It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected as President of the United States. But, regrettably, I believe that the time has come to do this.

It is time for Progressives to stop “whining” and arguing among themselves about whether President Obama will or will not do this or that. Obama is no different than any other President, nominated by his national party. He was elected with the hard work and 24/7 commitment of persons who believed and enlisted in his campaign for “Hope” and “Change.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist nor have a PhD in political science and sociology to see clearly that Obama has abandoned much of the base that elected him. He has done this because he no longer respects, fears or believes those persons who elected him have any alternative, but to accept what he does, whether they like it or not.

It is time for those persons who constituted the “Movement” that enabled Senator Barack Obama to be elected to “break their silence”; to indicate that they no longer will sit on their hands, and only let off verbal steam and ineffective sound and fury, and “hope” for the best.

Robert Kuttner, who once hope Barack Obama would be the next FDR:

Let’s stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president. He has taken an economic collapse that was the result of Republican ideology and Republican policies, and made it the Democrats’ fault. And the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over.

So what can we do about it?

the choices boil down to these:

*Let Obama continue to undermine the economy, the real Democratic Party, and the New Deal-Great Society legacy.

*Do a ton of grass roots organizing to put pressure on the administration to change course and in the meantime to back real progressive leaders. The one time in recent memory that something like this worked was in the successful campaign to have Elizabeth Warren appointed interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The trouble is that the Warren appointment was something of a one-off. Though progressive pressure can produce an occasional decent appointment, it is not capable of compelling Obama to grow a spine.

*Run a progressive candidate against Obama in the 2012 primary. At a recent meeting of the Democracy Alliance, most of whose private donors and trade union backers were big Obama supporters, the two White House emissaries were ripped apart. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka was severe in his criticism of the White House failure to promote a real jobs and recovery program. Co-panelist Austan Goolsbee appeared weak and ineffectual, like his President.*

[….]

Yet if we are to be spared an awful decade, both economically and politically, either Obama needs to grow a backbone; or some other Democrat could well challenge him in 2012. Either course will require the progressive community to stop crying in our beer and to get out and organize.

Politics Daily: Dan Rather is predicting a primary challenge to Obama.

Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather is predicting that if the Bush tax cuts are extended for two years (as now appears likely) President Obama will face a tough primary challenge from the left.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Jansing & Company,” Rather said:

“This is a political nightmare for Barack Obama as president. The more-left portion of his party hates this with a passion. And politically, within his own party, if this goes through, Barack Obama will be in a position to have his shirttail on fire, his back to the wall, and the bill collector at the door. Which is metaphorically a way of saying he’s almost guaranteed — if this goes through — to have a serious challenge in a Democratic primary for president in 2012.”

Rather went on to add that “the perception of [Obama] is that he won’t fight for anything.” He also noted: “Many of the heavy contributors to the Democratic Party are beyond shock about this happening, and are saying to themselves, ‘This guy . . . has about four to six months to turn the perception of him and the party around or we’ve got to start thinking about somebody else in 2012.’ “

Wrong, Dan. We have about two months to find someone to run against this guy now or we’re doomed.

I did find one prominent Democrat who thinks the talk about primarying Obama is a bunch of hooey, good old Ed Rendell.

Outgoing Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told Salon in an interview this afternoon that he does not think “there’s any chance of a serious contender mounting an effort against the president.”

Rendell offered two reasons for his belief: First, any primary challenge would be “too hard to do — it costs too much money.”

And, second, Rendell believes that Obama has checked off enough boxes on the progressive scorecard to keep any challenge from the left at bay.

“Has he achieved everything that he wanted to achieve — or that [the progressive base] would have wanted him to achieve? No. But given the state of the filibuster rule in the Senate, I think he’s done well in moving the ball forward in a lot of areas, areas he doesn’t get credit for,” Rendell said, rattling off a list of Obama’s accomplishments: not only the healthcare bill, but also the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, credit card reform, student loan reform, and the extension of insurance to low-income children in the S-CHIP program.

Hey Ed, what could be more expensive than keeping Obama? He’s already given away the store. God only know what he’ll cave on next. The country is going down the tubes and you want to keep this tool in office?

That’s what I’ve got for today. What are you reading this morning?