Mary Hodder's much awaited write-up of what we called The Paris Index while talking about it in Paris a few months ago is up at Napsterization.

Mary's thesis is that the mechanism that underlies the perception of value in the Blogosphere -- links -- is too limiting, on many levels:

[from Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts]

Currently, blogs are measured in systems like Technorati or ranked in PubSub by links or by number of subscribers to a feed in Feedster. In particular, these are the not very interesting, subtle or telling measures used to make indexes like the Technorati Top 100 or the PubSub 100 or the Feedster 100. In Particular, the Technorati Top 100 is based purely on inbound links. All of these lists tend to favor those who blog in more general, popular topic areas, and not those who are specialists in an area.

For many bloggers the relevant sphere of influence is not overall popularity, as those indexes express. It's influence and connection within a community. And the relevant measure of connection isn't the number of connections -- it's the depth and impact of those connections. This is about celebrating the niche, and measuring engagement over time.

Mary then suggests that we need an open source algorithm that establishes the weighting of a whole suite of alternative metrics: inbound links, numbers of comments, indirect mentions, 2nd generation links, and so on.

I was a participant in the discussions in Paris (after dinner, with Mary scribbling on a napkin that she has photographed in her post), but I have started to take a different tack to the same problem, perhaps because I have been madly fiddling with a collection of web services based applications as a means of managing the operations of Corante. That pastiche of tools has given me a different idea.

Instead of developing a single, open source, mega algorithm for determining blog value, how about developing a simple standard for publishing blog metrics so that individuals or groups could easily collate various sorts of interesting metrics about blogs into meta-indices?

For example, imagine that I were to create an online solution, let's call it Blognetter, that would discover the centrality of any given blog in the implicit social network that the blog is part of (this would be a very useful tool, by the way). Pointing Blognetter at Get Real would discover links from Get Real to Mary's, Doc's, and Ross' blogs, and vice versa. Using various parameters, it would rapidly determine a network that defines a community, of some number of hops via links away from Get Real. Blognetter would calculate that Get Real is connected to and from a specific number of those other blogs. That service could then provide that data in an agreed upon XML format.

Ok, so imagine other services exist, that likewise provide other data -- like the number of indirect mentions (without links), or number of RSS hits, or number of unique visitors, for example -- and would provide it in a similar fashion. The last metric is something that bloggers themselves would have to provide, by the way, and suggests all sorts of issues about gaming the system, but let's leave that aside for the moment.

Lastly, a collating service, let's call it RankOut, could aggregate these various feeds related to Get Real, and any RankOut user could override the default weighting built into RankOut. RankOut may "know" what the feeds "mean" in a sense -- the builders of RankOut may be aware of the point of Blognetter, for example. Or maybe not. Any blog metric could be self-describing: the XML feed would include a description feild, and suggested uses, and so on. Then, based on the user's needs, wants, desires, they could create an array that would compare a set of blogs. If you think comments are a better indicator of value, skew that measure. If you think links are more important, go for it. If you consider mentions in the mainstream media more relevant for your analysis, bingo. The twiddling would be up to the user, and the rankings would shift accordingly.

And lastly, specific rating services -- the Robert Parkers of the blogosphere, if you will -- could then publish their ratings, based on what they deem to be most important. Wondering who the 100 most important contributors are to the whole swirling discussion around Social Architecture are? Or who are the most influential voices in the Carl Rove mess? There might be a dozen such lists on these and other topics created and maintained by various individuals or groups at the RankOut site, where such rankings could be published just like Del.icio.us bookmarks are, and tagged so that people can find them in a tagalicious way. This could lead to a wide and diverse ecology of metrics -- and critics-- coming into being, and over time we would slowly converge on more or less standardized ways of using them, as we begin to better understand how these individual metrics, and their combination, reflect the true value of blogs and the authors behind them.