In developing our “Top UK Blogs” rankings, we apply the following to Internet media listed within CisionPoint.
Is it a blog? This question has become increasingly difficult to answer over the past couple of years, as the “social web” has evolved and expanded leading to hybrid social media forms and the unreliability of previously definitive characteristics such as blog rolls and trackbacks.
To ascertain if the site is a blog, Cision Research looks for typical qualifiers such as content appearing in reverse chronological order; initiating content created by an individual or collective of recognized individuals; and the ability to comment on the initiating content. However, as blogs evolve and redesign their appearances, such as posts appearing solely as images and interaction on content taking place via other Social Media platforms, Cision Research evolves its criteria.
Is it a UK blog? Few UK websites use a tell-tale .co.uk domain, few are hosted in the US and many aim to participate in global conversation - it's not that easy identifying a UK blog.
For the purposes of this list, if a blog can be regarded as the creation of a UK resident Cision will consider it a UK web property.
Is it a "top" UK blog? Our point of departure is the assumption that a blog's influence is represented by the amount of people seeing it and the potential for it to be referenced elsewhere (including in search engine results).
A long list is therefore compiled using an algorithm to reflect two key measures of web popularity, inbound links and traffic measured in monthly unique users (when available). For each blog these elements are weighted to achieve a balance between measurable impact to date (traffic) and likelihood of future impact (links as a proxy for search visibility). The long list is then reduced, with each entry re-evaluated according to additional metrics, notably update frequency, total number of posts and interaction between blogger and reader. However, as blogger/reader interaction evolves, we now also evaluate interaction not only as blog post comments but also as engagement taking place offsite such as on Twitter and Facebook.
We exclude blogs that are directly affiliated to print media publications, such as newspaper and magazine blogs, as the influence of the main media provides the blog with an advantage. We are currently looking to rank blogs that are affiliated with mainstream media, as well as separating commercial and individual blogs.
In seeking to make our social media research more robust, we are constantly evaluating new data sources and new measurement criteria. By testing and re-testing the identity and weighting of the variables in our algorithm, Cision aims to make our measure of online influence as accurate – and as useful – as possible.