Today we’re announcing the latest addition to our social media analysis capabilities: MediaSignal™ for blogs. It’s a significant development that enhances our customers’ ability to tap into the blogosphere for insight and information.

At Biz360, one of the guiding principles of our product development process involves taking a pragmatic approach to fulfilling our customers’ needs. In this case, there’s a clear need for marketing and PR professionals to be able to measure the relative impact of blogs—from the top professional blogs to the fringes of the long tail—and to be able to make direct comparisons to traditional media coverage. Because here is no definitive standard for blog impact measurement, we saw the need to come up with something new.

Most of the current methodologies for measuring blog impact involve either estimating site traffic or counting inbound links from other blogs. Limitations of these methods include:

• With a list of blogs ranked by their overall authority or influence, it’s impossible to know which blogs have the most impact in a given market—is it the highly-ranked blog that occasionally writes about the market, or the lower-ranked blog that covers it incessantly?
• Links from mainstream media provide an interesting view into which blogs are influencing traditional media, but they typically aren’t counted.
• The impact of the “linker” typically isn’t accounted for, even though a link from a top-tier blog implies more impact than a link from a less popular blog.
• The impact of the reader typically isn’t taken into account. PerezHilton receives more traffic than Engadget, but the topics over which they have influence differ greatly.
• Today’s site traffic panels are too small to estimate visitors to low-traffic sites in a statistically valid manner.

After a great deal of experimentation and testing, we settled on a methodology that provides a new estimate of reach that incorporates traffic estimates, linking patterns from blogs, and linking patterns from mainstream media. Our link analysis produces particularly interesting results, employing a technique that enables us to estimate not only the number of sources linking to a given blog, but also the impact of the sources.

The benefit of the detailed link analysis can be seen in the table below. Over a 3-month period last year, Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine and Heather Armstrong’s Dooce received incoming links from similar numbers of sources. However, the sources linking to BuzzMachine received more than twice as many distinct links as the sources linking to Dooce, implying greater impact.

• Apples-to-apples comparisons. With MediaSignal, we have a single measure of brands, trends and issues across both traditional and social media.
• More relevant reach. Because our source rankings incorporate each source’s reach as well as its topical relevance, we are able to product a customized list of which publications and blogs matter most to each of our clients.
• More accurate reach. Our calculation of MediaSignal for blogs involves large-scale link analysis, calibrated by audience estimates to provide an understandable metric than pure visitors or pure link metrics.
• Tone impact. By factoring MediaSignal into the negative, neutral and positive impression counts we derive through our Point-of-View Sentiment engine, we’re able to weight our tone ratings by impact.
• Improved spam filtering. Thanks to the link-source impact analysis, we were able to identify and weed out many splogs that received many links but only from other splogs in the same farm.

Politics took center stage in U.S. news this week, thanks to mid-term elections. As expected, there was plenty of coverage in the mainstream media as well as blogs. Because bloggers commonly comment on news stories that they find interesting, a few sites that analyze blog content have become great resources for finding news about a given topic. My favorite free aggregator is currently Techmeme, which does a great job of surfacing the most-discussed technology stories online.

At Biz360, we monitor tens of millions of blogs—which gives us tons of data to mine. Because we also track thousands of mainstream media web sites, we’re able to track links between blogs and the media. In November so far, we’ve tracked 764,000 links from blogs to mainstream media web sites (and hundreds of thousands going the other direction as well). Analyzing the links enables us to surface some interesting nuggets, like this list of the most-linked news stories since November 1:

So why no articles on Democrats retaking Congress or Rumsfeld’s resignation? Even though these were two of the top topics in the news, they didn’t generate a definitive article that was linked to heavily by other writers. Because some of the stories developed over the course of multiple days, linking was diffused across different articles from many different sources.

The articles that did make this list span a number of different topics, but most of them share these common traits:

• Interestingness (a term coined by Flickr): the kinds of stories that spawn reactions and discussions.
• Authority: Many of the most-linked stories are based on exclusive reports or news scoops from trusted organizations. Half of the top 10 stories were from CNN, the third most-linked source after The New York Times and Washington Post.

Taken as a whole, online link analysis can be a valuable component of corporate early warning systems in market intelligence solutions like Market360. It’s important to know not only what’s being said, but also how far it’s being spread.