Reader to Leader by Jennifer Preece and Ben Shneiderman was linked off of the Connected Action blog recently. Having some down-time (well, not really, but needing some not-programming time to myself) I thought I would sketch out some notes and my initial take on the paper.
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No, no, no, not a Clay Aiken album, but in the world of social media and social networking, how do you measure the positive effects of your activities? This is the business that Networked Insights is into as it relates to advertising, but what about your home metrics?
Here are some easy ones:
If you’re thinking along with this post, you might already be putting together your own observations. You tend to send and recieved lots of updates, but if you have a moderately busy life, you don’t read most of them. I fly through my Facebook page because I simply don’t have the time to manage 200 relationships daily. I can probably handle 5 high-value interactions a day… maybe less if there are emotions involved.
Here’s another conclusion: Of all those inbound messages I just said that I choose to skim over, how many of those alter your day in any way? “I had ice cream.” Ok. “Going for pizza.” Maybe I’ll join you! Of all those inbound connections, first ask yourself if it is only one or two people making the noticeable messages. Is your network really providing much information for you? Of your 300 connections, do you only read 100 messages and act on 2?
Some more metrics, but these are of the more dorky, career-minded kind. When was the last time you did business over social media? Planned a trip? Coordinated something of value? I can happily say that of my near-500 connections across 4 sites I landed a single job interview and planned 2 parties.
So, to conclude, 30 minutes a day, 500 connections, 100 messages, and over the 2 years I’ve probably been involved with social networking I’ve done 3 things of interest.
Is it worth it or are we gambling that it will some day become worth it?
I’m really not so sure right now…
If you lay out the components of a blog: The post itself, the links on the sidebar, the blogroll on the sidebar (yes, it’s different), the tag cloud (I think these are worthless), and the comments, how would you distribute the importance?
I ask because among the blogs that I typically traffic, the comments are of more value and the blog is of secondary value. “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him,” [Prov 18:17], and so I am typically more interested in what the reaction is to the post if I am going to consider as authoritative.
For instance, I saw a woefully ignorant discussion about how all of generation Y just hates dem-der GOPers in which the author actually sited a study… done by a liberal group. While it was refershing to see someone take the 30 seconds to make a hyperlink and backup what they were saying, a shallow critical exercise showed the post to without merit, and this was pointed out in the comments. In this case, the overwhelming sentiment of the comments burried the author. It seems that the best information was in the response to the post.
As an aside (and I wish I had time and energy to tackle this idea at the moment) it is a fascinating exercise to consider how to parse a blog. Print it all out and circle the pronouns or the adverbial phrases and draw arrows to that which they refer to. By default they will refer to the blog post or one of the immediately preceeding comments. There are markers like @username to help, but it interpolating the relationships is non-trivial. You almost have to parse the segments of the comments and the blog, assemble them into their own independant documents, and parse them in isolation (speaking as one who would love to program this one day). Regardless, back to the topic at hand…
Despite the best quality information being in the comments as a corrective or commentary on the post, today in some discussions it was presented that unquestionably the blog post, itself, is of primary interest and value. That is, the first voice to cut through the noise and make an impression has more influence than the collection of 20-50 comments below which may very well offer the best information by way of direct content or commentary on the post above.
Hearing this, I stopped, thought for it a bit, and concur wholeheartedly. I can see this [bad] behavior in my own blog reading habits. When I get tired and am not thinking so critically, such as when blogging at 11:38pm, I read the top post and take it at face value. I do my own verification, but I do not mine the comments for work other may have already done.
Would it be wrong to think that future education courses need to teach this sort of critical data-mining, similarly to how we were told to read a basic paragraph (look for the main topic at the top, then bottom, then middle) or how to listen to classical music (identify things like Sonata Form or Sonata Rondo Form (it’s the A-B-A-B-A… stuff… you know it, if not by it’s musical name)?
Now, instead of asking where you put simply importance in a blog post, where do you assign:
I still believe that the blog post author may be excellent for linking references and may be a domain expert, but has not only an agenda but presure to publish to the blog. I believe the comments provide a critical check that flag bad posts (we all have them) and add a counter pressure to keep the post quality good. I also believe that 50 people reacting to a blog article will provided better, if uncolated, information.
I welcome studies to links that prove or disprove this. 
Comments are open should you feel inclined.
Sam Baskinger