ComScore and Federated Media (FM), which represents social media sites including Digg, PROTRADE, BoingBoing, and Dooce recently announced that they would be working together on a “research
and development initiative designed to provide comprehensive
measurement of conversational media such as blogs and community-driven
sites.”

I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome of this
research, especially as the current ways of measuring traffic on blogs
and community-driven sites are lacking. Technorati,
for example, while useful in showing who links to who doesn’t account
for traffic volumes in their ranking of blogs. Similarly, Alexa shows how many hits certain blogging sites get, but in the case of Vox,
it doesn’t show which blogs get the most hits (beyond the mention of a
few blogs on the site).  By way of example, Alexa doesn’t allow me to
track the traffic my blog gets. 

As blogging as a hobby and
profession increases, bloggers want to know how many hits their blog
gets AND how many people are linking to it. In addition, it would also
be useful to see how many times a blogger’s name is mentioned in the
context of a topic but a blog link is not provided.