Jackie – who I don’t know – was verbally and physically attacked during a tube journey and posted about it, together with a picture of her attacker, on her blog. She asked that anyone who could identify the person in the photo contact the police.

Let’s step back in time six months. The ‘How Not To Steal a Sidekick‘ blog was simply hilarious. (Blogger’s attempt to track down and shame thief with the aid of photos uploaded to the phone’s website, unbeknown to the thief. Blogosphere goes to Defcon 5). I don’t recall any complaints about it. In fact, I think all of us agreed it was genius.

What exactly is the difference, except that this is a more serious crime? No-one’s talking about retribution against the attacker, simply to contact the police if you know who he is, so they can investigate the matter further.

However, it made me think, and I’d like to register my copyright on the BlogWidow PC for Online Journal Fans. My wife thinks I’ve already got one, but I reckon I can take things a few steps further.

Features:

1. Integrated noise-cancelling headset for blocking out requests to go out/do housework/get off lazy arse for five minutes.
2. Implants transmit river of news directly into brain cortex, together with small electric shocks.
3. Three screens with ‘auto-cut&paste’ hotkeys for advanced EchoChamber(TM) functionality.
4. Processor, disks and all that gubbins; but you won’t be using anything but Firefox, so don’t worry about it.

Cost: £199 (+ life)

On the other hand, it tends to focus very heavily on the supposed A-listers and Silicon Valley gossip. Forgive me, but I am not too interested in what Jason Calacanis said about Nick Denton’s shoes at Michael Arrington’s barbecue. What they ought to do, I reckon, is throw out their existing reading list and use mine instead.

That idea might not fly in some circles. So that’s why I am very interested in Megite. The opening page looks much the same as Techmeme or Tailrank. But they seem to have a wider spread of sites monitored and there are a large number of subsections that allow you to focus in on topics from food to finance. The fun bit is ‘My Megite’. Basically, you email the guy – Matthew Chen – your OPML file and he’ll create a personalised page for you. [Not-so-techies: your OPML file is a list of all the feeds you subscribe to. You can export it from your news reader site or program.] Here’s the personalised page for the Search Engine Watch blog. I’ll post mine when I hear back from Matthew. (see below)

There’s not too much more information available, but it appears that the business model of the site is to license their engine to organisations. This sounds like a great idea: staying on top of the news in some industries must be a nightmare with dozens of sites and blogs to visit. Sphere, Icerocket and Technorati searches are OK, but don’t do a great job of organising the information that emerges. Good luck to them, I say, though they may need to find a slightly more elegant way of uploading OPMLs if the service takes off.

Update: Matthew is clearly working very hard. He came back to me with a link to my personal megite within two hours of this post. He also explains that there will be an online form for processing OPML files when they have secured enough resources to ensure that the server doesn’t fall over when lots of processes are submitted at the same time. Matthew points out that a link to an online OPML is better for these personalised pages because then they can keep it live when your subscriptions change. Oh, and they have a blog.

The report describes the four groups thus:

The Low Authority Group (3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

The average blog age (the number of days that the blog has been in existence) is about 228 days, which shows a real commitment to blogging. However, bloggers of this type average only 12 posts per month, meaning that their posting habits are generally dedicated but infrequent.

The Middle Authority Group (10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

This contrasts somewhat with the second group, which enjoys an average age not much older than the first at 260 days and which posts 50% more frequently than the first. There is a clear correlation between posting volume and Technorati authority ranking.

The High Authority Group (100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

The third group represents a decided shift in blog age while not blogging much more frequently than the last. In keeping with the theme of the maturation of the blogosphere, it seems evident that many of these bloggers were previously in category two and have grown in authority organically over time. In other words, sheer dedication pays off over time.

The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)

In the final group we see what might be considered the blogging elite. This group, which represents more than 4,000 blogs, exhibits a radical shift in post frequency as well as blog age. Bloggers of this type have been at it longer – a year and a half on average – and post nearly twice a day, an increase in posting volume of over 100% from the previous group…

As Amy Gahran points out, the problem here is the word ‘authority’ when what is really being counted is the number of times these blogs are linked to. As she notes, a blog with a tiny audience and very few links might be extraordinarily influential in the niche it covers. Amy suggests that ‘popularity’ might be a better word. I’d go one further and suggest ‘linkability’ is perhaps equally apt. Drew Curtis’ Fark.com is very highly linked-to, but it couldn’t really be described as influential.

My second example was going to be Boing Boing. I’m an enormous fan: hand-carved robots and needlepoint iPod covers crack me up. But is it influential? I’m aware that they have a civil rights and anti-DRM agenda, but since I’m in favour of those things anyway, I couldn’t really say that they had influenced me on those subjects.

But then I started to think about other ways in which the boing boing gang and other A-list blogs have been influential. In part, they have shown me what it is to write a blog, or some of the ways that can be done. The same thing goes for Scoble. He is sometimes mocked for writing about what he had for breakfast and other apparent trivia. But it’s about creating a persona for his blog. He’s likened coming to his blog to coming for dinner at his house. I think that comes very naturally for Scoble but for other bloggers, the creation of a casual, welcoming blogger alter-ego might be a very carefully constructed facade. Personally, it’s not for me. For my own satisfaction, I want to produce posts that resemble articles in some senses. That’s more time-consuming and means that it takes me a long time to do, so it has disadvantages.

So going back to the idea of authority. I think the A-list bloggers have an authority, but it’s not necessarily over how I vote or what I buy. They have authority over what I understand by a blog and what a blogger does. That in turn, will affect the way others blog and the nature of the blogosphere. And that, I guess, is what ‘blogebrity’ means.

• See what’s out there. New services can help companies analyse their online reputations. Blog-focused search engines such as Blogpulse or Technorati allow companies to search by keywords.
• Respond pro-actively. Companies need to take part in discussions about their brands; these discussions will take place regardless, often in the most unpredictable ways. The discovery of the geyser-like effects of putting Mentos mints into Diet Coke or Pepsi led to thousands of videos on YouTube demonstrating the phenomenon.
• Manage online conversations. Companies that enter the blogosphere need to be prepared to post even the most critical comments about their brands, products or behaviour. They also need to respond quickly and with the right voice. Communications that come across like corporate press releases will attract criticism.
• Match rhetoric with action. No amount of online communication will save a company’s reputation if it is not reflected in its behaviour. And any gap between corporate pronouncements and corporate action will be quickly spotted and will be generally derided.

The last point is particularly important, controversial and interesting. As Katy Howell of Immediate Future told me a few months ago, this is an age where a company’s wrongdoings might be blasted across the internet in a matter of moments. There really is no damage limitation that can be applied except being good.

Thanks to Drew for the tip-off and more.

You’d expect that, really. This doubling stuff has got as much to do with new blogs as new bloggers, I’m inclined to think. The number of bloggers may not grow nearly as much. But we diddle about with different hosts and platforms. Lose interest in one blog and start another. That’s purely based on anecdotal evidence: the 33% of my RSS subs that have changed address over the last 12 months. But those 33% are presumably pretty established (since I managed to find them, they must be) and so less volatile than the norm.

There are 1.3mn postings per day. So, only 1 in (meh..) 48 blogs get a daily update, averaged out. In reality, there’s probably a long tail: about 10% updated daily; 10% updated 2-3 times a week and the rest every now and then. I’d love to know the breakdown on that. How may of us only post once a week, a month? – quite a lot according to the stats. And what is the measure of that?

Update: Google Blogoscoped has the funniest take on this story.

There’s another stat out there called “engagement.” No one is measuring it that I know of.

What do I mean?

Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.

It kind of ties in with the recent talk about which are the most influential blogs, and the lists published by Edelman/Technorati of the top 50 bloggers in various countries, according to inbound links. The rankings have proven quite controversial, and I’ve seen a number of alternative lists (those three are for the UK alone). What exactly should we be measuring?

Traditional metrics, page views and users, would appear to do a poor job of showing either how engaged the audience is or how influential the writer is.

Inbound links seem to be a slightly better measure, though the flaws in that system are that (a) it only counts fellow bloggers, not general readers; (b) the most established bloggers, the A-list cartel, if you like, are accused of only ever linking to each other; (c) you might link to someone because you think they are wrong – it’s a good way to manufacture a story from thin air; and (d) it favours mainstream blogs over specialists.

Another stance you might take is that the number of comments on a blog give a good indication of influence and engagement. I quite like this. Obviously people are engaged if they get off their backsides and participate, aren’t they? Then I thought of a couple of problems. It would seem to favour controversialists over what the majority thinks, yet that doesn’t really mean they have a lot of influence; it just means they get people’s backs up. It is also affected by the style of writing – I would assume that someone who asks questions on their blog gets more responses than those who make statements.

Scoble continues, illustrating why a small, engaged audience might be a lot more important than a large, disengaged one. He also inadvertently suggests another possible measurement of this key property:

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.

That kind of suggests to me that there’s more fairness to the system than might initially appear. If response rates are higher when the call to action comes from an engaging blog, then ultimately, those engaging writers will be more successful.

Right. Can I have some money, please?

Richard Edelman has apologised on his blog for Wal-Mart-gate. Edelman PR appears to have aided in creating a faked* blog [http://walmartingacrossamerica.com - now taken down] about a couple travelling across America, camping in Wal-Mart car parks along the way.

Edelman writes:

For the past several days, I have been listening to the blogging community discuss the cross-country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for Wal-Mart.

I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.

Let me reiterate our support for the WOMMA guidelines on transparency, which we helped to write. Our commitment is to openness and engagement because trust is not negotiable and we are working to be sure that commitment is delivered in all our programs.

Richard

So (you are undoubtedly asking), what are these WOMMA (word of mouth marketing association, as it turns out) guidelines? This is what the site says:

Word of mouth can’t be faked or invented. Attempting to fake word of mouth is unethical and creates a backlash, damages the brand, and tarnishes the corporate reputation. Legitimate word of mouth marketing acknowledges consumers’ intelligence – it never attempts to fool them. Ethical marketers reject all tactics related to manipulation, deception, infiltration, or dishonesty.

So err… this is all pretty embarrassing for all concerned, and probably for anyone who has anything to do with social media marketing.

Three ideas or challenges…

(a) Word of mouth can be faked – it’s easy. But only a fucking idiot would try it. You end up looking like dicks because people will find out. (sorry, language). Wal-Mart doesn’t seem to have a lot to lose on the reputation front, as far as the Internet tells me. Yeah, I can see them trying that. After all, they tried The Hub: School Your Way (Ze Frank investigates).

(b) This affair sets back corporate involvement with social media. You see, we always thought they were phonies. Then people at MS, Sun, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, Guinness, Boeing and a load of others started to talk to us. They did it for a while, and after some time we started to think, ‘no – hang on – these guys are OK’. I think the people who’ve being doing it for a while are probably still OK, but new corporate blogs will fall under an even bigger spotlight.

(c) It probably wasn’t Edelman’s fault at all. Or if it was, there was a management failure. They’re more likely to be carrying the can for some idiot somewhere else, because they have to. They are the PR company; they bear the responsibility, it seems. In another era, Wal-Mart would have taken that role and it’s odd that people are saying ‘bad edelman’ rather than ‘bad wal-mart’. Maybe I don’t understand this correctly, but it seems that the irony of social media champions being caught undermining their big play is far, far more interesting than a company with a bad reputation continuing to do bad things. Ultimately, I think a lot of people will react like me, so good call by Edelman for putting his hands up.

(* Was this a fake blog? In the blog’s final post Laura says of the intended trip:

…And, of course, I’d write an article about it and may be able to sell a story to an RV magazine, with photos, of RVing in America and only staying at Wal-Marts … we decided to get permission from Wal-Mart to do so. So I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include Working Families for Wal-Mart, in order to find out if we’d be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots … They didn’t just give us permission. They said they would even sponsor the trip!

With no evidence either way, I believe this is probably true. It’s quite common for journalists to find an opportunity and then sell the story. But of course, they didn’t say that up-front on the blog. Without getting metaphysical on your arse (that doesn’t really work in an English accent), is it fake or true?

If they had said, in the first post, “we got sponsorship for this trip from Wal-Mart”, none of this would have happened. The rest of the blog would have been exactly the same. If it was a good blog, people would read, otherwise, they’d go elsewhere.

“We are sponsored by X” or, “I work for Y” doesn’t mean “I am a corporate whore“. It means “I am honest with you“.)

Seasoned googlers, of whom there is already a vast tribe, are nerds, anoraks and braces-wearers of the worst sort who spend every working moment searching the infernal engine for other people’s blogs.

They are descended from a generation of titterers, pranksters and spokespersons of the bleeding obvious who in a more primitive era used to fool around with the office photocopier, circulating allegedly humorous material (“In these days of equal rights, why is Manchester not known as Personchester”) faxed or posted to them by fellow-nerds who in turn had painfully copied the stuff from a parish magazine.

The world is now their oyster – or their lobster as they would say, stealing the joke without acknowledgment.

They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.

Googlers and bloggers do not have an original thought between them. Their ruminations on tax reform, Europe, immigration, Iraq, security, education and the rest have already been googled ten times over by fellow bloggers copying their source material from some other blogger’s googling diatribe to the local newspaper.

Hopefully, they will google themselves out of steam, replacing their hobby with games of draughts or snakes and ladders.

I stole this story from The Register. To which it was contributed by TechDigest. What nonsense! (*cough*)