Comments on: Conversational intensity: Claiming a term

By: walt

walt — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:37:18 +0000

Mitch, I would absolutely agree that if you’re trying to measure influence, conversational intensity is not a particularly useful measure. Fortunately, that’s not what I was trying to do–I’ve only used it in the context of looking at a field of blogs (in this case, liblogs: blogs by library people) and offering a few basic metrics on how they compare to one another. “Influence” was not one of the things I was looking at; as you say, it requires far more sophisticated measures, ones I wouldn’t begin to attempt.

Basically, for my purposes, conversational intensity measures conversational intensity: Nothing more.

By: Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:37:03 +0000

Well, at the time I was busy working on a system to measure influence and my business partner always cringed when I started talking about details. There were a couple other postings around that time that fill in details, including this one: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ratcliffe/?p=121

Interestingly, I heard exactly this conversational intensity metric come up with a company just this week as one of several metrics that are worth noting. My reply, as to Stowe’s posting and, by extension, yours, is that the in/out volumetric measure is a very rough, easily gamed one. And it can play games with one’s own perception of one’s influence because it can be an overly broad indicator.

Influence is reputational, topical and variable based on the frequency with which someone writes on a topic. Using number of comments alone, especially over all postings on a blog during a timeframe, when examining a blog’s influence on a particular topic can be very misleading if the blog is popular because it is focused on, say, digital cameras, but the author writes one posting about French cheeses. If they didn’t get any comments on that posting, but average 3 comments per posting overall, would they be influential on the topic of cheese?

By: walt

walt — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:19:19 +0000

Mitch, thanks for the clarification; that wasn’t at all obvious from your post. I don’t know that I’d agree that conversational intensity in the easily-measured sense is “not particularly useful”–within the context of a single blog, it’s one of several metrics worth noting.

By: Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:20:40 +0000

Thanks for bringing the question of intensity up, again. I didn’t use the term as a synonym for Stowe Boyd’s conversational index, but in contrast to his usage, stressing that the ratio you cite is too easily gamed and not particularly useful.

Conversational Intensity, which is a term I developed while working on BuzzLogic’s influence algorithm, reaches across blogs rather than focuses on one blog in order to determine how postings in one place influence others. Nobody owns the term, the idea, because they only take on utility through usage.