Leadership in online influence scoring is becoming embattled territory as services in this area include Klout, Kred, Tweet Grader (by Hubspot), and Tweet Level. But one should note, all are driven by black box algorithms that vye for the title of industry  “gold standard” for anointing online influencers. This isn’t pure vanity either; knowing the level of influence of any player is a PR and marketing professional’s dream solution but nobody to date has provided the silver bullet.

This seminal article on “weblogs” by Clay Shirky (February 2003) remains a classic in the social media cannon and is a favorite around the Nexalogy office. Power Law or ‘Pareto’ distribution, describes the observable social phenomena whereby the majority of content is created by the minority of producers. It’s an unavoidable response to the plethora of choice. Network theory shows how one’s individual choice to read a blog reverberates through their network based even though such choices are sometimes completely subjective – like preferring one style of writing over another or feeling politically aligned with like-minded sources.

The main thing to remember when considering influence graders is that they are at this point blunt instruments at best. They’ve grown from being impression measurement tools trying to measure context and subjectivity, as described above. I haven’t been astounded by the results of Kred so far but I have to say that I’m most optimistic about their methodology because they been quick to slice influence into domains. With Kred, at least social capital is seen as context dependent.

Tweet Grader (the free version, anyway) has long been outstripped especially in the insights department. Surely they can offer me something better than six words in a tweet cloud featuring “RT” as my most used word? Please.

One has to ask, is it a good thing that the most influence is wielded by a small group of people? Social media content creators that reach a certain momentum in twitter followers and blog links become the a part of that small bracket thanks to search engine ranking algorithms and twitter recommendation engines. The impossibility of knowing the blogosphere is exciting the way moving from a small town to a big city is exciting. Pseudonymity allows bloggers more wiggle room to express themselves, opinions are as diverse as they are plentiful and online social mobility becomes possible.

If there is one thing that the Occupy and Arab Spring movements have shown us in the last few weeks and months is that power imbalance has consequences and social media still has disruptive potential  Influence graders are bell weathers of power. I argue that a consequence of grading influence and doing it well will confer merit, power and its multiplication effects for those who actually deserve it.

Will these companies step up to the work for the interests of the 99%?

Special Thanks to Zach Devereaux (Chief Analyst Nexalogy Environics) for his valuable feedback on this post.

Claude was looking through an old issue of Monocle the other day and came across a great piece by Tyler Brûlé (an old friend and neighbour of mine from high school days) that anticipated the current crisis by several months and made some really sound suggestions for how newspapers can regain some of their mojo in the current climate.

Brûlé wrote (in December 2007), “2008 may well be the year that some established dailies decide to give up the game and either go under or completely digital.” His suggestion? “…We’d suggest a high-quality 20-page broadsheet… with no ads smaller than full-page, lots of analysis and even more ink on the page.”

Newspaper revitalization is a constant topic of discussion here in our office at Nexalogy. Our weblog and Twitter analysis work consistently demonstrates that most big-issue stories have clear traces in both blogs and microblogs before newspapers ever get to print on a subject – a fact that newspapers must find a way to leverage.

Moving towards a format such as the one Brûlé suggested, complemented by a truly authoritative online presence, would go a long way to ensuring that the good work that newspapers have always done will not simply disappear.

To be authoritative in their markets, newspapers should increase the analysis and contextualization work they do and prospectively search and publish links (in the online edition) to the most important opinion pieces in the blogosphere related to any topic. This would create an ecosystem that they organize and focus – and from which they could profit once again.

The study looks really interesting – and it’s certainly good news for Nexalogy, since this is one of our key service offerings. At the same time, however, from what I have seen of the study the executives are primarily concerned about “rogue” employees and other individuals spreading incorrect or misleading information.

What we have found in the course of our work raises the stakes even more – we have found in several cases that seemingly innocuous, “business as usual” company activities can and do have a negative effect on corporate reputation. It’s this more holistic view of corporate reputation – and remediating problems found – that is the true challenge.

The blogosphere and social media represent a huge opportunity for most (if not all) large companies. What’s clear, though, that using old media techniques to either understand or address new media reputational issues is a non-starter.

Besides the fact that it is funny and kinda true, does anything strike you? The date maybe? 2005!

That’s right 2005!

Maybe somebody should send this to Christie Blatchford the next time she decides to belittle bloggers and journalists who blog (aren’t they becoming one and the same?) in her article: I’m not blogging this, mark my words.

Christie Blatchford could be one of the last of a dying breed. As text moves from being something we scribble or type out on paper to electronic information to be retransmitted and associated to other electronic media, those who uphold stringent definitions of ‘types of journalism’ by association to a particular medium may well be on their way out as all information becomes electronic.

To a certain extent the turmoil we are seeing in the TV, newspaper and traditional recording industries, could be interpreted as the passions of various practitioners hanging on to their respective favorite media crucifix instead of just giving in to the painful, but inevitable digital transformation to come.

*Zach Devereaux, one of Infoscape’s researchers, is a long-term friend of Nexalogy. Zach is a top-notch researcher with whom we’ve worked on some really great projects.

A more insidious bug occurs with the language preferences. Google Blog Search will return fewer results when the Google interface language that you have specified in your Google preferences doesn’t match the language you want to search in.

Yesterday, Michael and I came across a brand new type of bug at Google Blog search: searches starting on Jan 1 2008 until the current date were only returning results dated after July 15. Of course now that I am writing this post, this problem seems to have been rectified. Strange indeed. Did anything special happen on July 15?

Feel free to try to reproduce all of the other bugs described in the OII post, those at least are longstanding and repeatable.

I don’t know about you but these problems make me want to cheer for all of those underdog search engines that are trying to break into market these days.

At Nexalogy we don’t make quantitative claims about the extent to which the blogosphere is representative – in our work, this varies on a case-by-case basis, and a big part of our job is to ensure that the analysis we do relies on a substantial dataset that we construct.

The other argument on this point relates to the sheer size of the blogosphere. For years, people have tried to assert that there are X number of blogs. Another approach – one that we prefer – is to talk about what proportion of people blog themselves and read blogs. The numbers are pretty impressive.

In Quebec, the most reliable information comes from NETendance CEFRIO and Léger Marketing, whose survey data suggests that 8.3% of Quebeckers publish a blog (March 2007) and that over 25% of Quebeckers read blogs (July 2007).

Earlier today Sebastien Provencher from Praized Media published a post summarizing new results from e-Marketer.com about the US blogosphere on The Praized Blog. In terms of bloggers, the numbers tell an even more impressive tale. In 2008 they estimate that 13% of Americans are bloggers and over half the population (54%) reads blogs. By any standard, figures like these are impressive.

Sometimes events like these in Montreal are entirely populated by established experts, but it was very nice to see that this one included a mix of experts and people who wanted to learn more about blogging and the enterprise. Even better was the fact that the meeting was very much focused around discussions that were animated by the presenters (i.e., not a lecture).

Congrats to Muriel Ide for putting on a great event and to Martin Ouellette, Mario Asselin and Isabelle Poirier (among others) for some particularly good interventions in the discussion this morning.

The technology that allows Scitizen to work is brand new, but the idea of peer review, which is a core element of Web 2.0, is as old as science itself…

Whether we are looking at Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Scitizen or the process of open source programming, a self regulating community review is what makes these sources of information so reliable.

Scitizen is an excellent example of how Web 2.0 is democratizing the means of information production, blurring the line between scientist and journalist and cutting out the traditional TV or newspaper middlemen.

Check it out first.

And then read how it works (from the we feel fine site):

The We Feel Fine data collection engine automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs.
We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”.
Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.
Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”.