They also highlight issues for me about our online identities – Firstly, it’s clearly not straightforward to evaluate credibility, and takes some skills and knowledge of the best tools to sift out the important information. And there are obvious concerns about maintaining your online identity, particularly if it’s a public/professional one.

Not for the faint hearted!

I’ve deliberately chosen to remain anonymous, apart from providing the URL to my instructor and some fellow students. Based on my experience and refelections (and I think the tenor of many posts on your website), I think there are good privacy reasons for doing so.

But I don’t intend to use my anonymity to provide me with the scope to make comments without recourse, so I appreciate your feedback.

Cheers.

Normally, when using technorati to establish credibility to select “authority” as your search default. I checked your search and you clearly used “freshness” freshness doesn’t measure anything in relation to credibility – simply who has the most recent link.

If you were to search the inbound links to my site via “authority” you’d note the type of sites linking to me are relevant sources.
http://technorati.com/blogs/melaniemcbride.net?reactions=&sort=authority

Also, my site isn’t properly a “blog” it’s a professional website that contains a blog. These distinctions are important.

If you want to do a proper blog analysis, I’d recommend you analyse a blog – not a website (that has a blog).

If you want to assess reputation, I encourage you to look at the kinds of people linking to my work via the delicious URL above. You’ll note, of the first ten or so, several are fairly high profile figures online.

Additionally, had you read more than the first three listings on the technorati list you’d see that it’s not “mostly” students linking to me. There are 31 links listed, not 20 and 56 “reactions.”

Everyday, I have a look at the stats for my inbound traffic. Viewing these stats tells me how people are accessing my content. As I mentioned above, a high percentage of my traffic comes from individual Google reader accounts – accounts that are not public or accessible. You should know this about RSS – particularly when evaluating a site based purely on inbound links.

A better idea is to qualify somebody’s bio by doing a Google Search on their name and looking for reference points that support their status or identity. This typically means you are going to look at the first 5 to 10 pages of results – not the first 5 listings. You might have also clicked on any of the links in my bio to other professional profiles like linkedin. If you viewed my linkedin network you’d have a better sense of my online profile;
http://www.linkedin.com/in/melaniemcbride

If you’re going to analyse a professional person online I recommend you take a more thorough approach. As I said before, people take their reputation very seriously online.

Please pass that on to your instructor. Also, since you’ve taken the time to analyse my site in such a public way, I’d like very much to know what course this is for, where its being taught and who is teaching it – for the purposes of understanding what sort of criteria your instructor gave the class for blog analysis. I’m also interested in knowing if:

1. Your instructor has a blog
2. How long your instructor has been blogging
3. If your instructor is familiar with the history, figures and debates in blogging over the past 11 years

Feel free to have your instructor email me directly with answers to the above questions.

1. Impartiality/bias
When assessing blogs you you are assessing a personal voice/site. Not a collective or objective site. I’m not sure where the criteria of “objectivity” falls into an analysis of blogging but your instructor ought to rethink that in relation to what blogs are and have been for the last 11 years (please review a basic history of blogs and blogging – I can recommend several – along with all of the debates around the notion of objectivity as an assessment for individual voices).

Not anywhere on my site do I claim to be impartial or unbiased. My blog is my voice and my opinion – that’s self evident. Also, I have a very distinct and critical take on life online. That’s why the people who read me read me.

2. Ranking audience via technorati:
A good number of my regular readers access my blog via Google reader and other RSS subscriptions. Technorati only lists inbound links so it’s not a measurement of readers but inbound links. Back in the old days, it was the definitive gauge of readers because RSS wasn’t the default. My readers are heavy RSS users so this may account for that number.

Before I began writing on this site, I had a well established blog with hundreds of inbound links. Back then, I put a lot of time and energy into promoting my site. Now I don’t.

One really important source now is delicious. Namely, how many people link to individual posts. But more important WHO are the people linking to the individual posts.

Also, another good idea for your web analysis is to source the person’s name in Google to see how many references exist to that person’s work and where they’re coming from. If you did this you’d see that a lot of my inbound traffic is coming from relevant sources – academic blogs and other citations. You might also read this:
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/linkedout.html

Good luck on your next assignment.