In which case, the charts above don’t include any of these ‘softer’ metrics – they’re just Technorati Authority – but the August PR Friendly Index looks at more wide-ranging measures. I compiled figures from HowSociable.com which generates a ‘score’ from across 22 social media sites.

I looked into grabbing data from del.icio.us but I couldn’t get consistent results. Since it’s been redesigned I might look into this again, but I think the problem I found with HowSociable – that is, how to derive a unique search term that is mostly fair across the board – will be even more intractable with del.icio.us.

For example, I get wildly differing results if I search for brendancooper, brendan cooper, brendancooper.com and http://brendancooper.com. Which is correct? How do I do this with other sites that have generic names? And if I should do all four searches, for all blogs, then that suddenly becomes four hundred calls. I just don’t have time/willpower/brainpower.

It’s still something I’d like to include though. Maybe one day I’ll wake up and think of something clever. Meantime, we’ve got HowSociable which kind of helps.

http://prdisasters.com/blog-leagues-a-magic-bullet-for-online-popularity/
Remember?

You are so right Brendan, no metric is totally reliable and I think that Technorati is increasingly off. It is funny that when I look at your graph for my blog it does coincide with a ramp up on my end in RSS subscribers and (more importantly IMHO) of comments left by folks. But it also runs with a dip in actual blogging for myself, which is interesting looking at all the other data.

No matter what I love reading this stuff and the conversations it sparks!
/kff

@Sally – you’ve hit on the real problem with any metric – none of them are totally reliable. I’d say the ‘weird’ performance can occasionally be due to spam blogs linking up with other blogs, and occasionally Technorati quite simply goes a bit oopsy-la. Even Google have had difficulties recently, so much so in fact that I had to completely abandon Feedburner for some important work I was doing and am not going to return to it until I’m confident it’s passing the right information.

@ike – as I said, I’ve only included blogs that have been constant through this period – ie haven’t come in, dropped out or changed – simply so I’ve got comparable data, especially for the totals. It’s not personal – even I’m not in the ‘core blogger’ set.