Get me off this crazy thing!

Kent Newsome knows how to craft a metaphor, as “Technorati’s George Jetson on the link treadmill approach” (to measuring authority) demonstrates.

Kent was responding to Edelman’s new Social Media index, which seeks to rank authority by factoring in the use of non-blog social media in addition to the traditional monitoring of blog linkage.  Kent points out that this new score is still more a measure of popularity than of authority, and seems to say that Technorati does a good enough job at that already.

Supposing you could come up with an accurate measure of authority, would that really be useful?  I have to ask, “authority on what?”  Does it really matter how your overall authority stacks up against Engadget (30,053), unless you’re Gizmodo (23,072)?  If I want to learn about Ruby, I’d get a lot more out of reading Reg (301) or Assaf (168) than by searching on TechCrunch (21,636) or Boing Boing (25,574).  And people looking for help with Synergy/DE had better come to little ol’ me (55).

No site can cover everything with authority.  Nobody is omniscient.  To become an expert in one area, you must ignore other areas to some degree.  Authority on a given topic rests with those who concentrate on it.  Any measure of “general authority” is therefore flawed.

What you’d really like to know is whether or not you are reaching your target audience(s).  The best measures that I have seen for that aren’t simple scores.  They involve analyzing your referrer links and comment activity.  Not how many links so much as where they are coming from.  Are other sites linking to yours on topic, or are they pointing out your overuse of jargon?  Are search engine referrals finding you on keywords that your content really addresses, or did an unfortunate confluence of terms bring you would-be meth makers and porn perusers?  Most importantly, do comments and links form a meaningful discussion of your subject matter?

Yes, it is possible to assess authority, within specific domains.  But it isn’t as simple as visiting Technorati, and I doubt it can ever be accurately distilled into a number.