Nielsen BuzzMetrics and the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam conducted an interesting analysis of blog comments (PDF). They studied 500 randomly selected blog posts and here's what they found:
* 80% of the sample posts allowed comments, but only 28% had them
* The number of comments in the entire blogosphere is comparable to the number of posts in active, non-spam blogs. Therefore comments constitute up to 30% (150,000) of the daily volume of blog posts (700,000), according to BlogPulse data
* Less than 2% of all blog comments are syndicated in feeds
* The textual size of the commentsphere is 10 to 20% of the blogosphere
* Use of comments is beneficial for ranking blog posts in useful ways
* They demonstrate with data that comments are an indicator of the popularity of a weblog
* They also do the same for controversy; high comments = high controversy
Clearly comments are undiscovered country and Nielsen BuzzMetrics is working hard to figure out how to search this critical data pool and use it to measure influence. Here here. This data is essential and it's underutilized, yet difficult to mine. As I mentioned at the end of last year, someone is going to crack this nut soon. I would bet on Nielsen BuzzMetrics to do it. They already do a good job mining message boards for marketers. (Via OpinLaB)
Technorati Tags: Comments, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Commentspehere
