The New York Times reports today that the Curbed blog network founded by Lockhart Steele raised $1.5 million.

Nick Denton, Mr. Steele’s boss when he was managing editor of the Gawker Media blog network, and Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, a maker of business software, are among the individual investors. Gawker Media also invested.

Here's a quick overview then a longer rundown of their blogs:

Alexa* data, including subdomains:

The blogs have only modest traffic, though perhaps the narrow focus and (presumably) somewhat upscale readers yield sufficient ad revenue.

Weds. Nov 7: two choices:

• the Executive & Entrepreneur Conference ($895, which includes the regular conference on Nov 8-9)
• b5 media day (free with a regular "full access pass")

Thurs. Nov 8 - Fri. Nov 9: exhibits and a wide variety of concurrent sessions ($225, or $175 for some ill-defined lesser set of events, or $99 for exhibits, keynotes and 3 sessions.)

The sessions span an impressive 9 tracks:

• Beginners
• Advanced
• Podcasting & New Media
• Entrepreneur
• Monetization
• Executive
• Sports Blogging
• Milblogging
• Political

plus a few sessions on Special Interest & Pop Culture.

It may or may not be too late to get a good flight or hotel, but you can still get 15% off the expo:

The exhibit hall (south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center) appears to have at least 14 large booths filled ("quad" size or greater), plus another 70 or so single or double-sized. (I'll be wandering the show floor this year; maybe next year we'll have a booth.)

There's an old argument among entrepreneurs and investors about whether (and how long) new startups should stay in "stealth mode", keeping secret the details (or even existence) of their venture. Jeremy Liew covered the pros and cons in February at the Lightspeed Venture Partners blog. Two years ago, respected entrepreneur Mark Fletcher blogged that Stealth Start-Ups Suck. Entrepreneur-friendly VC Paul Kedrosky disagreed.

Charlie O'Donnell and Alex Lines have chosen anti-stealth for Path 101:

From the very start of our business, we are going to do things differently.  We are going to build in an open, transparent way.  We're going to tell the world what we're up to, how we're doing it, and solicit feedback on how we can do better from every stakeholder.

Why?

Because we believe that will make us more successful.

(Hat tip: Fred Wilson, A VC, Liveblogging A Startup ... who is O'Donnell's former boss at Union Square Ventures, and a soon-to-be angel investor in Path 101.)

The story so far:

The LinkedIn post reads like an "open letter" to the business development folks:

We have a lot of ideas about how we would see working with LinkedIn that we'd like to share, but there doesn't seem to be a working group of potential partners, so we'll just post them here.  Here are the top 10 ways that we see Path 101 working with LinkedIn.

One potential problem with transparency, others can read between the lines:

Now, what strikes me about the post is how clear it is that Charlie as already reached out to LinkedIn, and that his calls have not been returned.
...
While drawing public attention to this snubbing could backfire, I bet it serves to get the right person at LinkedIn to return the call and form a partnership. And if this works, look for a lot more startups to go anti-stealth.

Another: some blogger may point out that there are only 7 not the promised 10:

Typo, or not, NOT off to a good start

(Hat tip: Techmeme whose grouping isn't perfect, so check out the links to A VC too.)

Tuesday, October 16: Apple announces that the next release of Mac OS X, "Leopard" (10.5) will ship in 10 days. John Gruber posts the news on Daring Fireball, a leading Mac blog. Plus a request: Pre-Order Leopard Via DF Amazon Affiliate Links.

If you pre-order through these links, Amazon will send me a 7.5 percent kickback.

I.e., you get a good price and free shipping, and I get about $10.

Wednesday, October 24: Gruber posts a status report. 408 single copies + 171 family packs.

Yesterday, Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider does the math: nearly $5,800 in 8 days (based on 7.5%). Not bad for a single blog post followed by 2 links on the top-right of the blog since then. (The links are still there, so the total is surely rising.)

Today, we run a few more numbers. At 914,854 pages views from Oct 1-25, that's roughly 293,000 over 8 days, or an 0.2% purchase rate. Or, using a simple model for unique visitors over the same time period, about 1% of readers bought an upgrade.

How do you make your post stand out, especially when there's a blog storm around a hot issue? Choose a title that's unexpected.

The general view is that Facebook's valuation is absurdly high, so try something like: Three Reasons Microsoft Underpaid For Facebook. The silly image of Steve Ballmer probably didn't hurt, but you have to follow the link to see that.

In a post criticizing TechCrunch for stories based on "off the record" sources, Nelson Minor writes (emphasis added):

Blogs are great for discussing current events, particularly shades and nuance from multiple angles. And I like juicy rumour sites. But real journalism has a strong code of ethics, a responsibility to source reports, and careful editorial review. TechCrunch isn't even trying to do that.

Did TechCrunch misinterpret "off the record"? JD Lasica of the Social Media blog thinks so, and provides definitions. Does the distinction between "off the record" and "on background" matter to bloggers? I'm not convinced.

Meanwhile, I want to address the larger issue. This "real journalism" is at best an ideal that journalists strive for. But in practice it's just a myth, punctured daily in the political blogosphere.

As noted, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine is one of the best sources on blogs and journalism. For example:

journalists and their conventioneering organizations like to make many lists of rules about ethics, which make some lose sight of the more fundamental notion that ethics are really a matter of individual conscience and trust: You can follow every rule in the book but still slant a story or a paper's coverage by the news you select and how you write it; you can still squander your trust.

there's nothing journalists like better, it sometimes seems, than dissecting their professional ethics. ... But what they can lose sight of the fact that it's quite simple, really: Do people trust you to tell the truth?

The answer:

only 9% of Americans say they have a great deal of trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly," while another 38% say they have a "fair amount" of trust in the media to do this.

Original source: a Gallup Poll whose URL doesn't work. These 2007 results show a drop compared to Gallup's 2003 poll, and a significant drop since the 1970s.

(Another must-read from Jarvis: Taking the pledge.)

Yesterday Matt Marshall of VentureBeat published a great followup on the supposed dip in Facebook traffic. Read the post for lots of details on comScore, Hitwise, Compete and Quantcast.

Takeaway point: Web measurement is difficult, even when the stakes are high and there's a large investment of time and effort.

One way to sell a Web ad is to charge based on the number of times it's displayed. That's perhaps the simplest approach (though we'll cover several of the difficulties at some point). Another method is to charge by the number of different people who see the ad, taking into account that one person may see it several times. That approach is tricky, e.g. if someone deletes cookies between visits, views the site from both work and home, or is behind a connection that masks individual visitors (perhaps a large ISP; perhaps a company network). But advertisers want data, even if different sources yield quite different results.

The New York Times provided some examples today:

Condé Nast is up first:

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month?
...
Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates

(A minor gripe: unlike in the data below, the NYT didn't specify whether the company estimate was US or worldwide.)

From Jim Spanfeller, president and chief executive of Forbes.com (emphasis added):

Forbes.com had 11.6 million United States visitors last month, far more than the 7.5 million estimated by Nielsen/NetRatings and 5.8 million from ComScore.

ComScore, Nielsen/NetRatings and (not mentioned) Hitwise use panels of "representative audience members" -- a holdover from TV where there was no hard data on who watched a specific program or even channel. One key limitation of panels: the office.

online publishers say that their systems drastically undercount people who use the Web during work hours, particularly in offices where corporate software makes the wanderings invisible to the tracking systems

Panels also have trouble covering niches, whether "the wealthier people whom Condé Nast says frequent many of its sites" or "students on college campuses" (see our why comScore got Facebook wrong) or "Hispanics and other demographic groups".

One thing that has changed compared to TV, site publishers are no longer at the mercy of these panels:

But the Internet has given publishers a new form of ammunition: raw server data with precise numbers of site visits and page views. This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by ratings companies based on panel samplings.

(For a large site, the "ballpark figures" are generally based on data from an in-house Web analytics team. I suspect they have a pretty strong incentive to count as accurately as they can in the face of several technical challenges.)

Consistent with the journalistic formula, quotes from the tracking companies are up next:

“It’s in their interest to make their audience look as big as possible,” said Gian M. Fulgoni, chairman of ComScore.

Manish Bhatia, executive vice president of global operations and U.S. Sales for Nielsen/NetRatings, agreed.

“If the panel numbers were higher, I don’t think you’d be having this debate,” he said. “People would love us.”

Later in the article:

The ratings company say they have improved their panels, and point fingers back at the Web publishers, accusing them of mixing international and domestic traffic and of double-counting people who visit a site from home and from the office.

To make matters more complicated, consumers who delete cookies — small bits of computer code that track their online wanderings — are also overcounted by publishers’ servers, by most accounts.

(Another article gripe: the more substantive responses were left to the end. Apparently the NYT thinks the ad hominem attacks are more important. And, were the ratings companies really using language such as "point fingers" and "accusing", or is that just the reporter's spin?)

My take: it's not easy to track unique visitors. Domestic vs. international is probably not much of an issue; I suspect that the IP addresses in log files provide a reasonable view there. (And, note the large difference even though Forbes quoted their US figures.) Home vs. work is a big issue, though affects both sides. Cookies is clearly a problem, though very difficult to quantify. Panels may play a role when used to filter log files, but I doubt they can ever yield better results on their own. But the bottom line: what do the advertisers think?

(Final MSM gripe: someone should tell the NYT headline writers that nobody counts "hits" anymore, and in any case the article was about "unique visitors". So much for the paper of record.)

Hat tip: Techmeme.

Glossary: MSM = MainStream Media

OK, it was actually a whole series of posts. On June 21, 2005, media blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine vented his frustration (censorship added):

I'm having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn't work, maxes out on CPU usage. It's a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my home -- which I paid for -- he wouldn't have the parts, so I might as well just send the machine in and lose it for 7-10 days -- plus the time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for them to F'ING FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don't and I lose it for two weeks.

253 comments. June 23 (93 comments), June 24 (109 comments), two posts on June 26 (483 + 358 comments). That was just the beginning. Clearly he struck a chord. Many others were in the same boat, and Dell was deaf to the problems of its customers. To add insult to injury, in July the company closed their customer service forums.

August 17, 2005, Dear Mr. Dell:

Your customer satisfaction is plummeting, your marketshare is shrinking, and your stock price is deflating

Let me give you some indication of why, from one consumer's perspective. I won't bore you with all the details ... but your product was a lemon and your customer service was appalling.

Note the links in the original. That's part of what makes blogs credible: citing real evidence.

Fast forward nearly 2 years; Jarvis meets Michael Dell at a party.

I told him that I never intended to start a riot. When I hit a wall with my computer, I just blew of steam on my blog. But once I did, I, too, learned how amazing the internet is at allowing people to coalesce.

Fast forward to today: a guest column in Business Week:

The following April, Dell (DELL) did join that conversation. It dispatched technicians to reach out to complaining bloggers and solve their problems, earning pleasantly surprised buzz in return. That July, Dell started its Direct2Dell blog, where it quickly had to deal with a burning-battery issue and where chief blogger Lionel Menchaca gave the company a frank and credible human voice. Last February, Michael Dell launched IdeaStorm.com, asking customers to tell the company what to do. Dell is following their advice, selling Linux computers and reducing the promotional "bloatware" that clogs machines. Today, Dell even enables customers to rate its products on its site.

After detailing some specific (and interesting) changes that Dell made to their customer service, Jarvis continues:

the opportunities created by the conversation go far beyond dousing fires. ... if you cede control to your customers, they can add tremendous value. Dell's customers not only make product suggestions and warn of problems, they help fellow customers fix them.

A quick roundup of reactions: consistent with their new approach, Dell's blog covered the story. Stuart Henshall suggests: "every VP Marketing should be enabling a social media listening program." Geoff Livingston puts it in perspective:

Is Dell perfect? No. I think their social media pros Lionel and Richard would be the first ones to tell you that. But they are part of the conversation, and they are actively serving the community.

Jarvis offers additional notes at his blog:

it's hard not to praise them when they ended up doing everything I was pushing in my open letter to Michael Dell. I'm not saying that I caused that, just that we ended up agreeing and they ended up seeing the value in listening to and ceding control to customers.

For some interesting thoughts on where Gravatar could go in the future, see Joshuaink's Seven and a half questions for Tom Werner from April 2005.

I get the feeling there is a bigger picture with these little comment avatars of yours, where do you see Gravatar five years from now?

You're right. Gravatars are only the beginning to what I envision as a comprehensive comment management and profile system.

How often have you left a comment on a weblog and never returned to follow up on the ensuing conversation? It happens to me all the time. I forget the URL, and I'm not about to go subscribing to the comment feeds for every weblog I frequent, so commenting can almost seem futile. The gravatar system is uniquely positioned to solve this problem. Since all gravatars are served from a central location, I have the ability to determine (through the HTTP referrer header) what gravatars appear on what web pages.

Worth noting: the Gravatar tagline reflects this larger vision: "Your Identity -- Online".

Gravatars aren't just for blogs. This acquisition puts Automattic in a good position to address an even larger market:

15)    Why hasn't anyone been able to aggregate all of my comment activity across the entire web and turn it into a feed that I can put into my lifestream on Tumblr? There are a bunch of companies working on it, but I don't think anyone has nailed it yet. And I am not just talking about blog comments, I am talking about ratings and reviews on Amazon, Yelp, Menupages, Digg, etc, etc.

We covered several comment management companies last month: BigSwerve, coComment, Co.mments, Disqus, Intense Debate, and SezWho. With Automattic potentially moving into their space, perhaps some of them will offer a lightweight avatar service. I think that's a good way to start a relationship with blogs (and beyond) that are reluctant to outsource the entire commenting feature. (That's certainly true here at Blogosm.)

Automattic (the folks behind WordPress) just acquired Gravatar, ("Globally Recognized Avatars"). (Hat tip: GigaOM.) What is it?

an 80x80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

How does it work? Behind the scenes, the blogging software sends an encoded version of the commenter's email address; Gravatar returns an image. Plugins or HOW TO notes exist for WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, LiveJournal and several other blogging services and Web development languages. We also found a Python implementation that's not listed on the Gravatar site. (We don't yet support Gravatar here at Blogcosm, though it's been on TO DO list since before we launched the site!)

A blogger has several options when adding gravatars:

• maximum "rating" (G, PG, R, X) to help ensure that the returned icon is appropriate for the blog's audience (though relying on the commenter's own rating)
• icon size, currently from 1 to 80 pixels (Automattic announced future support for 128px)
• fallback URL to display an alternate image if no gravatar is available for the commenter's email address

One potential drawback: fetching an icon across the network for every comment may increase page load times. WordPress users can try the Gravatars2 Plugin from ZenPax. Scott Yang offers a Generic Gravatar Cache based on PHP. Jon Galloway provides details on caching in ASP.NET.

On the business side: financial terms were not disclosed. Gravatar developer Tom Werner is a Ruby fan (blog name: Ruby is Awesome) but Automattic plans to rewrite "to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid" (presumably in PHP). In any case, Tom lists his employer as Powerset (a hot startup which he apparently joined in February) so I doubt that employment was ever in the cards. In any case, congrats to Tom on what I hope was a nice ROI for a very useful service.

Interactive chart: Computers-and-Internet/chart/Technorati-vs-GoogleReader/

Our work-in-progress disclaimer: every source for data on page views, visits, unique visitors, time spent, subscribers, and links is flawed. But imperfect data is better than no data.

Even better: combining data from multiple sources can yield much better data than provided by any single source -- especially after some analysis to understand the differences. Here are some examples. We've narrowed the scope of yesterday's Technorati vs. Google Reader chart to focus on the Computers & Internet category. In theory, there should be a straight-line relationship: blogs that are more popular will tend to have more links tracked by Technorati, and more people who subscribe to their feed. The general trend is (arguably?) visible -- e.g. the bottom right of the chart is empty. Let's look at the biggest outliers.

Slashdot is #4 in Google Reader subscribers (among the subset of data harvested by others and that we consider to be blogs, or "sufficently blog like" to track). However, it's nowhere in the Technorati 100; probably because Technorati doesn't consider it to be a blog. (Fair enough; it's a borderline case.)

What about 6, 8 & 9? These blogs are by or about Google, or about search (by the author of a well-received book on Google). So, it's no surprise that readers of these blogs tend to use Google Reader (and perhaps feeds in general) much more often than readers of other Technorati 100 blogs.

Moving straight down the chart: The Official Google Blog is easily within the noise level expected when comparing different sources, so doesn't really need any special explanation. Still, it's nice to see that the direction of "error" is consistent with the above.

Conclusion: having explained the upper-left outliers, the straight-line trend looks pretty good. There's still more work to be done but that's enough for today.

The Technorati 100 rank is based on unique links in the past 6 months. We computed a similar Google Reader "position" by ordering blogs according to number of subscribers. With lots of caveats and exceptions, blogs that get the most incoming links tend to have the most feed subscribers and general Web traffic. Although the correlation is very rough, I think the above chart shows this trend -- e.g. the bottom right is empty. (The top-left less so, but the 4 biggest outliers are easy to explain.)

We haven't had time to analyze the Google Reader data in much detail, but wanted to post an early draft so that others have the same tools. If you're interested, use the interactive version to explore outliers, then post likely explanations in the comments.

Bleg: If you know someone who is working on automating the collection of subscriber stats, please let us know. There are well over 50 "top" blogs missing (especially outside of tech and business), and the existing data has known problems.

Update at 4:12 p.m.: on the new interactive chart, mouse over any point for details on the blog: name, URL, tagline, description, Alexa rank, Technorati 100 rank and Google Reader subscriber count.

How many people subscribe to feeds from the most popular blogs? Moving down the list, how quickly do the numbers fall off? The answer: it's a power law distribution, popularly known as a "long tail" thanks to Chris Anderson's 2006 book and ongoing blog. A key earlier work: Clay Shirky's 2003 essay, Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality.

Granting that this weekend's subscriber stats are flawed and that the manually-assembled list is incomplete, the curve shows the expected shape. The above image is a static teaser; I hope to post an interactive chart by the end of the day. [update: done]

(Kevin Burton charted similar data on Sunday. We omitted non-blogs and added color coding by category. FYI: Kevin's Tailrank meme tracker currently leads with Sunday's TechCrunch post about Google Reader. I wonder whether the Mashable post will appear later today.)

First, a very sincere kudos to Pete Cashmore of Mashable for digging up hard data that shows how Google Reader's "feed bundles" can skew results. It's clear that subscribing to a bunch of feeds with a single click isn't the same as choosing individual feeds by hand.

What Pete added: real numbers.

(I haven't dug into the specific examples to see if Pete's conclusions are the mostly likely explanation, though his results aren't that surprising.)

Where Pete went wrong: concluding that these specific errors make the whole dataset worthless. ("**" added)

Google Reader stats, in case you don't know, are bulls**t. In fact, all Feedburner stats for most top blogs are bulls**t due to the effect of default feeds.

I've looked at lots of data over the years, including as part of corporate data quality projects. Even without gaming, any non-trivial dataset I've seen has flaws. The answer is to understand and attempt to fix or work around flaws, not to throw out the whole thing or wait for flawless data. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Even if the data is flawed for some or all of the 91 blogs included in the feed bundles, much of that can be corrected for based on analysis like Pete has done. And, there's a whole world of blogs that aren't affected. Sure, there are similar problems with other feed readers, home pages with RSS subscriptions, etc. Switching from feeds to sites, there's also no shortage of problems measuring page views (bots!), unique visitors (cookie deletion!), time spent on site (tabs!), etc. But data is useful and important, so people make do with what's available given time and budget constraints. (Mashable isn't shy about mentioning some stats on every page of the site: "in excess of 5 million monthly pageviews" and "ranks among the Top 100 blogs worldwide".)

Has anyone automated the process of harvesting the subscriber stats? If so, please send details. I'll bet there's meaningful data to be found.

One more bit of overreach:

The easiest way to get a default feed on one of these startpages is to own it, promise to promote it on your blog or be friends with the person who runs it.

Did the post include any evidence? (I'm sure these things happen, but making implied accusations without backing them up doesn't lend credibility to the post.)

On Crunchnotes, Mike Arrington presents another side to the story, including a useful data point:

the complainers rallied around the notion that the stats are somehow fixed. In particular, some of the feeds are included in bundles that users can add to the reader, jacking up their stats.

First of all, these blogs and other news sites did something interesting to get included in those bundles. Second, the effect is not nearly as great as everyone seems to think. Gizmodo, for example, is included in the technology bundle on Google Reader, but it has just 30,000 subscribers. Competitor Engadget, by contrast, has 345,000. So where did Engadget get those additional 315,000 subscribers? Perhaps they simply earned them.

It wasn't that long ago that TechCrunch wasn't on any list at all. We got big by writing about things we care passionately about and linking early and often to good stuff out there on the web, particularly other blogs.

Google Reader recently began to show the number of subscribers for each feed in the result list when you search for a new feed. (Ionut Alex Chitu on Friday, Oct. 12) On Sunday, TechCrunch published a preliminary list from Gabe Rivera, weighted towards tech and general news sites. (A reasonable starting point considering the source.) Robert Scoble posted numbers from the new TechMeme Leaderboard plus 55 of his favorite feeds. Together, the posts hit the top of TechMeme late Sunday night and gathered reactions all day Monday. Here's a roundup.

On the Official Google Reader Blog, Mihai Parparita provided some details:

Google subscriber counts: These numbers include subscribers across all Google services, including Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut.

FeedBurner numbers: If you use FeedBurner to manage and track your feed, you will see a subscriber count there that is attributed to "Google Feedfetcher." This number is a sum of all the feeds that you have redirecting to your FeedBurner feed URL.

Alas, he also delivered the bad news that the weekend data collection wasn't accurate:

Reader's feed search was recently showing stale and incomplete data, but as of today (October 15) the numbers should be the same everywhere.

The update resolved a discrepancy between Google Reader and Feedfetcher that Tim Bray observed on Sunday.

To find some data for yourself, click on "Add subscription" and type a keyword, e.g. a blog name or the domain name without the ".com". (Entering the full domain name will subscribe you without showing the feed count.) To search using the domain name, click "Browse" and then use the "Search and browse" option at the bottom. Pro: fewer false-positive matches. Con: likely to miss some actual feeds, e.g. hosted at Feedburner or other service.

As shown in the (edited) screenshot above, a blog or site may have several feeds. It's tricky to get an accurate count: add numbers for actual feeds, skip duplicates, skip keyword matches on other sites, and make a judgement call for comments and other feeds tied to specific tags or sections of a site. (Someone may subscribe to a tag rather than the whole site, but the same person may subscribe to multiple tags.) I suspect that most people who subscribe to comment feeds are already subscribed to a blog's main feed -- though perhaps that's less true for blogs that have a separate comment feed for each post.

At first, the several URLs for a single feed looks like a bug -- e.g. a URL with or without the trailing slash ("/"). However, Andy Beard points out that it's a great hidden feature to see how someone subscribed to your feed:

1. Using A Subscription Button

2. Autodiscovery

3. Javascript Bookmark

Alas, some of the duplication is in fact a bug, e.g. the exact same URL but different title or description. See Nusuni Dot Com for a good example.

Another bug (per Technosailor): Google continues to fetch the old feed URL despite a 301 "permanent redirect" code in the HTTP header. (A 302 "temporary redirect" is one way to have the feed URL on your domain but have the actual feed served by FeedBurner or another service. TBD: research how this affects the reported stats.)

Try gathering data for several sites: it takes time. Now that Google is publishing the data, they should publish their own "top feeds" list. Louis Gray pointed out that he requested this feature over 7 months ago. (Might be interesting to see whether Google Reader has made any progress on his other 9 suggestions.) I'm not holding my breath, e.g. FeedBurner never released such a list based on their data.

With Google Reader's use of AJAX, the data isn't easy to grab with a script either. Perhaps the solution will come in the form of an API, e.g. FeedBurner provides one. (Though that only works for blogs who use FeedBurner and haven't opted out of making their data public.)

Meanwhile, please stay tuned for further analysis of the data that's available today.

I'm not an academic and therefore (quite happily) free from the need to squeeze a modern resource into an complex set of citation rules. Still, I enjoy digging around to find good resources, so here's a followup to Saturday's post.

In 2006, the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) updated their manual to include a rule for citing blogs. It doesn't appear to be online (gotta buy the book), but a blogger provided an example:

Raymond P. Ward, Minor Wisdom, How to Cite a Blog http://raymondpward.typepad.com/rainman2/2006/03/how_to_cite_a_b.html (Mar. 27, 2006).

Key points: includes the title of the actual blog entry, the date posted, and the permalink URL (assuming the example is accurate and Ray's bullet list isn't precise). See the post for details.

I found another source for MLA ("humanities style") citation. MLA Formatting and Style Guide: Works Cited: Electronic Sources - The OWL at Purdue

Hawhee, Debra. "Hail, Speech!" Weblog entry. Blogos. 30 April 2007. 23 May 2007 <http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/2007/04/index.html>.

That looks sensible -- other than the silly angle brackets. It's missing an explicit label to distinguished date posted from data accessed, but perhaps it's too much to expect a set of arcane rules to yield a self-documenting result. See their additional examples for a corporate blog and comments.

The MLA (Modern Language Association) doesn't mention blogs, but has a 15 item list and several examples. (Hat tip: An Anatomy and Physiology Blog which includes 2 other sources that don't mention blogs but may still prove useful.)

Yale's Writing Center provides samples in MLA, APA & Chicago styles, though makes the obvious mistake of listing the hosting provider (e.g. Blogspot) as "sponsor". Granted they discuss the issue in the comments, but that's no excuse for getting the examples wrong.

As an aside, it's amusing how the very credentialed world of academia views the rather informal world of blogs (emphasis added):

Blogs—an abbreviation of “weblogs”—are websites or areas of websites devoted to dated reflections by the site’s author. Many blogs are hosted on or presented as private websites where the author claims little special expertise or no professional affiliation relevant to the blog’s topic.

That's true enough, though I'll bet it's also true that most blogs with any real following in a particular field are written by those with "special expertise" and often "professional affiliation" in the field. That's a key reason people read blogs: to go directly to the experts (or at least a wider variety of viewpoints) rather than relying on reporters to filter information that's clearly outside their areas of expertise.

Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs:

• C. Sample Citation and Introduction to Citing Blogs
• Citation Rules with Examples for Blogs
• Examples of Citations to Blogs

Hat tips:

• Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed: Ooooh, Blogs are Now Authoritative, who cites:
• Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution How to Cite a Blog, who cites:
• Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing HOWTO cite blogs in formal academic medical papers, who cites:
• Joshua Schwimmer, Kidney Notes "How to Cite Blogs" by the NIH / National Library of Medicine

The NLM's definition of a blog isn't bad:

Blog is a contraction of Web log. A blog is a publicly available Web site that serves as a personal journal or sounding board for an individual or as an information tool for an organization. The blog owner posts messages and invites comments from readers. Entries or messages are displayed in reverse chronological order and the site is usually updated daily.

But the guide itself is several years late and still flawed.

Paul Kedrosky:

I don't think it makes sense to give a generic URL, rather than a specific one, but it's a start.

Alex Tabarrok:

Bizarrely, however, they include a space for "Place of Publication."

c18 in a comment at Marginal Revolution:

the style guide appears to be based on book format, when it should resemble a periodical. There should be an article title as well as the blog title

RADIOGUY in a comment at BoingBoing:

"blog on the Internet" ???

IIRC, blog is short for weblog, which implies the World Wide Web, which is most certainly on the Internet.

Where else would the blog be?!

Plus:

• includes the year the blog was founded (which is largely useless)
• omits the actual date of publication

I couldn't find a publication date for the document; I guess they follow their own bad advice.

If you wish to cite this publication, please use the following format:

Patrias, Karen. Citing medicine: the NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers [Internet]. 2nd ed. Wendling, Daniel L., technical editor. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2007 [insert Year Month Day]. Available from: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/citingmedicine

Yet another gripe: the above sample omits the useful "cited" prefix. As is, it's not immediately clear which Year Month Day to insert (date found rather than date posted).

A style guide for citing blogs isn't new; here's The Columbia Guide to Online Style (CGOS) by Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor, though it shares the flaw of linking to the blog's home page rather than the individual post's permalink and omits the useful "cited" prefix.

Blogs and Wikis

Humanities Style

Cite blogs or wikis similarly to citing mailing list or newsgroup postings, including the name (or alias) of the author, the title of the posting (if applicable), the title of the site, the date of posting, and the address of the site, followed by the date of access enclosed in parentheses. 

Bartow, Ann.  “Parody Is Fair Use!”  Sivacracy.net.  26 Mar. 2006.  http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/  (30 Mar. 2006).

Scientific Style

Include the name or alias of the author, the date of posting, the title or subject line of the posting (if available), the title of the site, the URL, and the date of access.

Bartow, A.  (2006, March 26).  Parody is fair use!  Sivacracy.net.  http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/  (30 Mar. 2006).

(Emphasis added.)

More useful, 2 items from Dennis G. Jerz (of Jerz's Literacy Weblog) back in 2003. Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA Style:

Jerz, Dennis G. "Citing a Weblog in MLA Style." [Weblog entry.] Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 11 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=2000). 11 Dec 2003.

And Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA Style:

"Susan" (smgct1@comcast.net). "Oddly enough..." [Weblog comment.] N.d. "More Questionable Use of My Work." Dennis G. Jerz. Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 10 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=1998)

(See both posts for more details.)

On Wednesday, veteran journalist and blogger Om Malik posted a provocative question: Facebook Traffic Tanks - This can't be real?

comScore is about to issue September 2007 user engagement and page views data, and ... there seems to be a 9.3% decline in [Facebook's] unique visitors from 33.75 million in August 2007 to 30.6 million in September 2007. Even their page views are down 3.8% from August 2007. (See chart.)
...
Why would that happen to both Facebook [and Classmates] ahead of back-to-school season? It just doesn’t make any sense!

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim pointed out that it's a seasonal blip that showed up in Hitwise data last year. Great catch, but still doesn't explain why apparent traffic should drop when usage is almost certainly growing.

Yesterday Om filled in the details:

Paul Sutter, co-founder & president of Quantcast explains that the dip we are seeing is because of the panel model adopted by comScore. ComScore has a panel that has a bias toward Internet users who log on from home. The same is true of all measurement panels - Nielsen, Hitwise or Quantcast. As kids go back to school, they vanish from the panel, even though they are still using Facebook, from school dorms.

(Quantcast supplements their panel with direct measurement, which we use.)

As I said earlier today when defending comScore and Reuters:

Every source for data on page views, visits, unique visitors, links, and time spent is flawed. But imperfect data is better than no data.

Gathering and organizing data is part of the central mission of Blogcosm; perhaps I should add the above to a footer that runs on every page. I'm not picking on comScore here, the point is to take all site data with a grain of salt. Please add a comment if you have other specific examples.

Blog profile: GigaOm

On Monday, Barry Ritholtz sounded the alarm at The Big Picture:

Soon to be worthless: Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix
...
"All traffic to your blog will then be assigned as traffic to __."
...
I have now seen this or similar demands from 3 separate mainstream media outlets: A wire service (Reuters), a financial magazine, and a major newspaper. In all three examples that I reviewed, the blog itself isn't transferred or sold to the media outlet
...
Let's consider the ramifications:
1) This is nothing short of a naked grab to steal Blog traffic numbers, and artificially boost MSM web traffic numbers.
...
2) Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix data are soon to be -- assuming they are not already --  worthless bull$h%t. If these ratings companies are complicit in this arrangement -- or if they even know and  tolerate it -- their business model goes kaput. Since ma