Texture design

Posted by shor

The scholar Andrew Lang once said,

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination. "

Unfortunately, I end up using statistics like a drunken man uses toilets - incorrectly and with my head hanging over the toilet-bowl thinking, "How did I get here?"

Community Analytics┬?

With all the statistics available to online marketers, how do you decide what's useless and what's useful? Time to dredge up an old school metric called Signal to Noise ratio. SNR is a simple way to trend the health of the Designmoz community.

Appropriated by the blogosphere from electrical engineers, SNR measures the quality of your user comments. It is relatively easy to compute - divide a user's MozPoints by their number of comments - and as will be revealed could quite potentially unlock the mysteries of the Designmoz universe. I use 'potentially' because, like all well-intentioned drunken ideas, I have to admit I haven't really thought this all the way through.┬?

Daniel and Rae's F%^king Excellent Adventure

My first task is to calculate the SNR for Designmoz' top 100 members (I excluded the staff members because they're paid to play on Designmoz):

After I'd done so, it doesn't take long to realize DanielTynski is a hidden gem. At 102 points and just 16 comments, he may be a man of few words but when he speaks, we listen. Daniel boasts an amazing 6.38 SNR, more than twice that of the next best. Daniel must be the epitome of the Designmoz community, right?

Mayhap, because on closer inspection he has also submitted 3 (excellent) YOUmoz entries - one which generated 41 points - 40% of his total MOZpoints. Are YOUmoz points distorting the SNR?

Yes! Why? Um, I'm not sure, is there such a thing as analytics goggles? When I was drinking, SNR was looking a lot sexier.

Anyway, as my brain stumbles out of its stupor, I adjusted the original set of results with a little normalization to produce a handy weighted SNR.

With weighted SNR, Rae has everyone beat, coming in at 2.4 SNR (just ahead of Daniel at a very respectable 2.2). This immediately teaches me one thing.

Swearing a lot is the key to racking up MozPoints!

Welcome to drunken analytics, solving mysteries of the universe one at a time.

And If You Don't Know, Now You Know┬?

So now you how the metric works. What else can the notorious S.N.R show?

Stuff.

Designmoz' top 100 members (weighted SNR in brackets):

• SNR = 1.55 (1.44)
• Excluding staff = 1.35 (1.23)
• Designmoz Staff only = 2.08 (2.08)
• Premium Members only = 1.49 (1.35)

Premium Members have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than regular members. That's a great reason to sign up to Premium, right Rand?┬?

Designmoz top 10 (from SNR100, excluding staff):

1. DanielTynski
2. sugarrae
3. shor
4. Igor Mordkovich
5. stever
6. Bud-Caddell (who inspired this post)
7. Nathania Johnson
8. feedthebot
9. ciaran
10. WebGeek

Designmoz top 10 (weighted; excludes staff)

1. sugarrae
2. DanielTynski
3. shor
4. stever
5. WebGeek
6. kimber
7. microdesign
8. mbarr
9. willcritchlow
10. Dr. Pete

The comments of the top 10 are typically interesting and add value to the conversation (except for that shor dude, he talks about toilets).

SNR Head vs. Tail (excludes staff):

• Head, top 20 members: SNR = 1.43 (1.27)
• Tail, top 500 members: SNR = 1.29 (1.18)

Weighted SNR of Top 500 members, including staff:

┬?

Note the concentration of high signal users in the top ranks and, more importantly, there are very few users below the lower control limit - the Designmoz community is healthy!┬?

SNR is a simple metric. Some would call it silly (just not to my face). It can't adjust for articles and comments predating the MOZpoints system, nor does it include Designmoz staff entries. Should we refrain from engaging in banter, me-too comments and taking the 'bad cop' stance because of these results? No, because the community would become narrow, single-minded and suffer for it.

What do these statistics actually reveal? A lot. Or maybe nothing. As they say, torture numbers and they'll confess to anything. It is up to you to decide what the key performance indicators for your community are. Once you have these KPIs, my best advice is to set up those nifty upper and lower control limits to filter out the statistical noise from the signal.

The moral of the story? We might never invent a hangover cure, but at least Avinash Kaushik has analytics covered.

To paraphrase:

Signal minus Noise -> Insights -> Action -> Happy Community -> Traffic, Customer Satisfaction, Money!

How do you deal with signal versus noise?

What metrics would you suggest to measure the health and quality of your blog or forum community?

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Posted by great scott!

Okay, okay, last week's Whiteboard Friday was a bit frivolous (although I gave you all fair warning before you clicked play).┬? This week we've tried to give you a bit more signal and a little less noise with the on-screen debut of our very own Digg Guru, Matt Inman.

Matt's as close to a professional Digger as you can be while still having a life and getting other work done (no offense, Neil), so he's here to share a few up-to-date tips and tricks for building successful, Digg-targeted content.

Happy Friday everyone and, to those of you in the US, enjoy the long weekend!

Also available on my YouTube page.

This week's musical guest is Mudvayne performing Dig (Everything & Nothing Mix).

Technorati Tags

Designmoz, Digg, Matt Inman, Design, Optimization

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Posted by rebecca

Plaxo, a "smart address book" service provider, recently published their second Connected Index, which is a list of which job titles have the most connections based on the average number of contacts in their address book. 15 million Plaxo members' address books were used for the study. Unsurprisingly, talent agents were reported to be the most connected with an average of over 628 contacts, followed by publicists (490), and publishers (475). Check out the press release to read more about the findings.

What I found especially interesting was corresponding list of the top 50 connected professions. According to the list, bloggers ranked above the Plaxo average of 203 with an average of 267 contacts in their address book, which was 20 more contacts than journalists, reporters, and writers (247). Obviously, this study is a bit questionable in its accuracy (is "geek" really a profession?). I'm not sure if only business contacts were counted for this study, or if the average number includes personal contacts. Would my brother, my best friend from when I was eleven, and my high school Spanish teacher count as "blogger contacts"?

Even still, the suggestion that bloggers are more connected than journalists is intriguing. We've all heard the ongoing blogger vs. journalist debate (Bloggers sacrifice accuracy for timeliness! Wait, no, bloggers are more accurate! They don't cite sources! No, they link more!), and it's pretty clear that some journalists aren't fans of the increasing popularity of bloggers. However, in February Digital Journal pointed to an ifocos study that surveyed Americans and found that 55% of Americans "said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism." The survey also found that

Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The general public certainly seems to think that the rise of bloggers and the increasing availability of media on the Internet will positively shape journalism. I think that, as a whole, journalists are better writers than bloggers, but bloggers do have speed and, sometimes, the injection of a subjective voice on their side (which can, at times, make for a more interesting, passionate read than something that only delivers the straight facts).

Does the notion that bloggers are more connected than journalists hint that this shift is already happening? Does this signify that bloggers have an advantage over journalists, in that they have more connections from which to develop breaking news, compelling stories, etc? Will journalists eventually embrace bloggers and become some sort of super journo-blogger (journogger?) hybrid, or do you think some of them will still uphold the "us vs. them" mentality?

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