Bacon's MediaSource to Track (some) Blogs

If you're interested, I explain why I think this is pretty inane:

http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/001584.html

Boy are you right! Frankly, I thought their story was so ridiculous that I would just let its stupidity speak for itself.

All of your points are spot on.

Well, once again I'm in a minority. I had posted some of this - or hit send, but not sure if it posted - on Darren's blog posting. We had had a few email conversations, but I thought this over more, and well, Bacon's makes sense.

Now, I use PubSub to track a client. I like PubSub, they're good folks, and I'm talking to them for my session at the NewComm Forum. But, does my client really need to read about a 14 year old girl that "hearts" their product? Is that going to affect things down the line? No, not at all, and I don't forward such clips because they're inane.

Bacon’s has the right idea. Tracking 250 of the leading blogs, as decided on traffic and influence, is better than having to go through all the garbage blogs that are out there.

250 is a starting point. That database will grow, as noted by Bacon's when I interviewed them. When I was in-house, I wanted my agency to get the most salient points to me, not all the drivel that was out there. The value-add for a large corporation is cheaper than hiring a person to scan the blogosphere, or outsourcing it to another company.

Jeremy has a point. Most action in the blogosphere is driven through a relatively small number of high-throughput nodes.

It's important to understand where a blog fits into the blogging ecosphere (or food-chain, to put it simplistically) before you judge the value of what they're saying. There are two things that are really important for the success of something like this:

First, you've got to be able to identify the networked relationships between blogs. E.g., how does Joi Ito relate to Boing-Boing -- which one's the first mover, and which one's the router?

Second, you've got to be able to do that dynamically, and shift your focus as the relationships change -- preferably both on an automated and human-influenced basis. (Because sometimes, aggregate movements -- the kind that can be detected and accommodated automatically -- don't reflect anything more than a feeding-frenzy. For example, even though at the height of "Rathergate", the action was mostly on Little Green Footballs, Instapundit was still the relevant high-throughput node at the end of the fray.)

What you say may be true, but who is Bacon's to make the decision about who the influencers are in the blogosphere?

If you read their press release http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=284212 Bacon's is going to have 3 of its 56 editors devote a total of 60 hours a week to covering the blogosphere.

Why doesn't Bacon's hire an influential blogger, or two, to track what's influential and hot in the blogosphere? THAT would mnake sense.

Bacon's: What do you say.