Conversational intensity

Stowe Boyd, formerly of Corante, offers the Conversational Index, a ratio arrived at by dividing the number of posts on a blog by the number of comments and trackbacks. Says Stowe:

The down side? Those blogs that we started at Corante that did not take off, and subsequently went dormant, or were shuttered, had a Conversational Index greater than one: too much speech, not enough banter. And those that started badly seldom pulled out of the problems.

This is a handy calculation for a blogger who wants to decide whether they want to continue to invest their energy in a blog, since a blog talking to itself has the appearance of being futile. That is, if you assume the blog is intended to garner an active audience.The CI is easily gamed and still a publisher-centric viewpoint. There are plenty of blogs that are simply records kept by the author, albeit in public; the author is simply sharing information, not trying to start an argument.

I prefer an argument, if I may state the obvious, so the Conversational Index is an interesting number to me. Some folks have already suggested the ratio be inverted so that higher scores reflect better conversational performance. Others reflect the same concerns I'll outline below.

It may be interesting to an advertiser wanting to have inventory in an active forum, but the utility of the conversational index is limited for several reasons:

• It may be gamed. Simply by turning off comment and trackback filtering and allowing everything to appear on a blog would drive the CI well below one.
• The statistic doesn't account for the perceived authority of the blogger. There are two ways that comments or the lack of them may be misleading about the importance of the blogger. If the blogger is perceived as an authority and doesn't get many comments, because no one challenges her much, and a lot of trackbacks, they will have a good CI score. The same is true of someone who gets a lot of argumentative comments based on their perceived lack of authority. Both will have a good (e.g., low) CI. But we know nothing about the nature of the discussion on the blog.

You can see evidence of the latter problem in Doc Searls' comment at Stowe's blog: "Oh shit. My ration sucks."  

So, Stowe's CI is a handy tool for egoistes and bloggers thinking about how active the community around their blog might be, but it isn't a business tool. Zoli Erdos points out that most business tools are top-down, publisher-centric views and that Stowe's Conversational Index is a "bottom-up" view, which I don't agree with because it is just another way of assessing the blog in and of itself rather than the relationship of the blog to the rest of the world. It could be a useful part of a greater set of tools, though.

Clearly, Stowe's got a hell of a Conversational Index score (inverted or not) from the posting, as he shows with this follow-up posting (thus, lowering or raising his CI). 

[Full Disclosure: I serve as Chief Scientist at BuzzLogic, where part of the business is focused on analyzing influence in conversational markets, so take my criticism with a grain of competitive salt.]