Blog Measurement still requires people.

Found a new blog today - KDPaine's PR Measurement blog, where she discusses, well, the measurement of PR activity.

The post I linked is about the use of blog monitoring services, which scrape content from the main page of the blog, but rarely the comment sections (where much of the interesting action is taking place).

And what it means is a lot of manual analysis, despite all the assumptions about automation. Yes you can certainly go in and scrape content off blogs to see what people are writing. But what you aren't getting automatically is what's in the comments -- and that can contain far more important information than the original blog.

The problem is the comments section is a crap shoot - it can be better than the original article, or full of social gossip, or a flame war, or a mixture of all of it, including people typing "First!" if they are the first to comment (it's an old game).

Information scraping services have a place, in fact I used Cyberalert to find Katie's blog - but to follow a thread of conversation requires human pattern recognition abilities. When I search blogs, I'm reading the original posts, comments, trackbacks, outside links, sitemeters and checking other posts to look for relevant material.

No software in the world - and no software company, can match a web-savvy human brain for relevant content. At least not yet. We are, as media monitors, still employed in the area of "useful human work."

As an added bonus, I found a site called Re:invention Inc, a site for and about enterprising women.