Announcing: Web Analytics Conversations, enhanced and revamped!

Ever wanted to know what are the "best" web analytics blogs? Want to praise yourself for being among the Top 10 web analytics bloggers?

Web Analytics Conversations

I'm introducing the Web Analytics Conversations, a Technorati and Google Blog Search mashup of over 150 web analytics blogs. Not only does it automatically rank blogs by Authority, Freshness and level of Activity, it also shows blog title, description and latest posts. The interface makes it very easy to sort blogs by any of those criteria, plus another one, called WAC ranking!

You can also search any of those blogs with the official Web Analytics Association search engine, which I'm also maitaining, or subscribe to a master RSS feed of all those blogs!

[WAC] the Web Analytics Conversation rank

Blogs can be ranked by WAC scores, which is the sum of the following underlying metrics:

• Authority, as defined by Technorati, is the number of incoming links in the last 60 days
• Freshness is the relative recency of the latest post
• Activity is the number of posts in the last 60 days
  

The concept is similar to RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value), where each metric is classified into quintiles: slices of 20% each. In the example above, Hitwise is actually shown at first position, with the highest Authority (821/821), a Freshness of 29/51 and an Activity level of 323/390. Each metric is brought back to a 5 grade scale and added up, for a WAC Score of 11/15.

Limitations

• The underlying data is automatically cached every day. If you ever happend to be the first person hitting the page for that day, the update process takes about 1 minute... Just be patient and it will get there!
• There are sometimes bad character conversions, leaving some weird artifacts in titles and blog posts.
  
• There is actually some dead wood, blogs that haven't been updated for a year.Those will be more apparent if you sort by lowest scores. I will remove them in the coming days.
• If your blog isn't listed, let me know and I will add it!

Why I did it?

My primary focus is on WASP. WASP includes some reporting features and I wanted to get more acquainted with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). Also, since I'm already maitaining the WAA search engine and have been keeping a list of web analytics blogs for over two years, I thought I could automate some maintenance aspects of it. Now, my VP of Finance (read: my wife) would ask me if this is bringing any revenue... well... No... Unless someones find a nice way to monetize it!

Try it out, and let me know your thoughts. What would you like to see there? Any ideas or critics are welcomed!