Alex Iskold and Richard MacManus have put together a nice analytical post with some insights into how they determined which are the most popular posts on Read/WrightWeb based upon social bookmarking sites Digg and Delicious.
I’ve seen people do this type of analysis of how their blog is going based upon comment levels and page views (in fact there are plugins to do it and post the results on your sidebar) but the idea of using social bookmarking sites as a basis for the information makes a lot of sense and as you’ll see by their post reveals a different picture.
Some of their reflections on the process:
On Delicious
“The pattern on del.icio.us is less obvious, but things become more clear once we realize that del.icio.us and comments on a blog reflect different kinds of actions. Comments reflect passions, bookmarks serve as references – so there is little overlap between them. More importantly, comments (like posts) are short lived. Unfortunately in our day and age, news and even analysis has a life span of a few hours. Once a post is off the front page of a blog, it is less discoverable and typically is not commented on anymore. The bookmarks of del.icio.us, however, have a longer lifespan.”
On Digg
“We noted that the posts that did well on Digg are somewhat different from the ones that got a lot of comments and picked up more links on del.icio.us. The full query results told us that while Digg users love posts about search, they also love the posts about browsers. In particular the Firefox vs. IE battle is dear to their hearts. And of course, digg users love posts about Digg – especially when it’s about Digg kicking competitor Netscape’s butt!”
While this type of analysis wouldn’t work for many blogs that don’t get much traction on social bookmarking sites – it is something a little different to what I’ve seen bloggers doing before to find out what readers are reacting to.
