How to Evaluate the Importance of a Blog

Blog has experienced a rapid development in recent years. In addition to its personal stage of personality, remarks exchanging and self-marketing, it also forms a network community of different knowledge and interest by building a blog network. Influence of some blogs has gone far beyond people's imagination. The interactivity and diversification makes that its organizational structure and quality of the information are in a great deal of difference, thus, construction of evaluation system is required to evaluate and filter the blogs of high quality.

Traditional evaluation method for network information resources is still applicable for blog evaluation. Some scholars use AHP to score content, architecture, interactivity and influence degree of a blog. The interactivity includes messages from visitors, number of comments, feedback speed and residence time. Influence degree includes visits, total links, as well as quality grade of linked blogs.

It is possible to build blog clues with links and reply links of related blog items, and then find important blogs through them. Usually we take human chain of a blog and use PageRank algorithm to select important blog information source. There are many similar algorithms to evaluate blogs, however, blog service providers, mostly use RSS feed numbers, PageRank, AlexaRank, traffic, comments / replies, TrackBack, etc., thus providing rankings of popularity to reflect the influence. These methods or indicators are now widely used in blog evaluation.

1.PageRank
Google's PageRank value is the most commonly used in blog evaluation. It flags the page level / importance, which is from 0-10. The higher the PR value, the more popular the page is.

2.AlexaRank
AlexaRank is a frequently used statistical indicators of visits, one can install Alexa Tool-bar in the browser to do statistics. It mainly depends on the number of visitors per day. A blog can improve the indicator value by using SEO, plug-ins, or Alexa toolbars of visitors.

3.Number of RSS subscribers
RSS is an easy way to share content online. One needs to have an RSS reader, or use the online RSS feed blog to manage blog content.

4.Number of Comments / Replies
Replie rate reflects readers’ interest in blog contents, and the influential blogs always get resonated. However, if comments or replies are not in a good number, but quality of them is high, or authors have a great influence, it should still serves as a reference in evaluation.

Overall, in order to get a satisfying result, when we evaluate a blog, we can take an comprehensive consideration of the evaluation methods according to the features and contens of a blog.