The Blog Divide: Just how far away is the blogosphere from everywhere else? And how could we measure the distance?

This blog (The Measurement Standard Blog Edition) publishes more or less the same articles and content as does our website newsletter (The Measurement Standard). Our traffic reports hint that perhaps the readership for the two versions is slightly different. And now I notice that one of our blog posts on social media measurement seems to have been noticed more by bloggers, and one of our posts on print media measurement seems to have been noticed more by non-bloggers.

Well, duh, you don't have to be a social scientist to figure that one out. But the bigger question is: How much of the blogosphere really is a separate audience? And just how far away from the rest of the world is it?

This morning, Katie Paine wrote me that she's noticed a Blog Divide between people who read blogs and people who don't. She's not the first to come up with this idea: Matthew Stibbe mentioned it over a year ago (in a slightly different context, but close enough). And probably there have been others who wrote about this, but that Google couldn't find. There, see what I mean? If the mention had been in print, Google wouldn't know about it. Separate worlds, I'm telling you.

So if there is a Blog Divide, how do we measure it? How separate is the blogosphere from, well.. hmm, separate from what? The non-blogosphere? The print world? For now, let's just say the print world, because that's easy to measure.

Measurement 101: That's about the size of it.
One way to measure the Blog Divide would be to go back to PR Measurement 101: Outputs, outtakes and outcomes. Suppose we measure each of those for both the blogosphere and the print world and see what the difference is. That would give us three measures of distance between the two media:

-- Outputs: On a given subject, how different are the topics, the messages, the arguments of the two media?

-- Outtakes: On a given subject, how different are the attitudes and opinions of the consumers of the two media?

-- Outcomes: On a given subject, how different are the behaviors (sales, votes, donations) of the consumers of the two media?

Geeze, sounds like a lot of work and some complicated results.

A simple number?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a simple elegant number that somehow represented the distance between the blogosphere and the rest of the world?

Farfetched? Yeah, but consider something really easy to measure, like traffic on some specific topic. Suppose we took a given topic, like, say, "dogs" and used Technorati to determine the amount of blog mentions of "dogs," and then compared that to the number of print mentions of "dogs," using, say, Nexis/Lexis. We'd have to express both as ratios of total traffic for that medium.

So if "dogs" was 1/2000th of blogs, but only 1/4000th of print, what would we know? (Could we say that "dogs" was twice as "important" in blogs as in print? Maybe. (How does importance increase as a function of mentions?))

What about the "distance" between blogs and print? The bigger the difference between the ratios, the more different the coverage of "dogs" between blogs and print. So, could we say that, on the topic of "dogs," print and blogs are 2000 Googles (or some catchy name for it) apart?
--Bill Paarlberg, Editor, TMS

Comments

[KDPaine]

I would argue that the ultimate outcome metric is going to tie back to leads or sales or web traffic no matter whether it be print media or on-line or blogs.

[Big Blog Donut boy]

Mr. Paarlberg,

Stumbled 'cross your amazing blog today. Truly an accomplishment! I would have to rank your insights as probably the second most profound blog experience I've ever had. And the first you might well ask? That notariety belongs to an esorteric little travellog known simply as "A La Vida" (http://homepage.mac.com/dangair/iblog/B1654249276/index.html),

But I digress. Thank you for sharing your remarkable insights with this humble reader.

Blog Ya Later, Aligator,

BBDB

[Big Blog Donut boy]

Mr. Paarlberg,

Stumbled 'cross your amazing blog today. Truly an accomplishment! I would have to rank your insights as probably the second most profound blog experience I've ever had. And the first you might well ask? That notariety belongs to an esorteric little travellog known simply as "A La Vida" (http://homepage.mac.com/dangair/iblog/B1654249276/index.html),

But I digress. Thank you for sharing your remarkable insights with this humble reader.

Blog Ya Later, Aligator,

BBDB