Lilia has some pretty interesting friends, and they’re beginning to blog.

First up is Anjo Anjewierden. He’s got an idea about blog certificates - easy ways of gauging a blog.

His initial list for what these certificates might contain is:

# Frequency (average number of posts per day).
# Length (average number of words per post).
# Quotes (percentage of content that is quoted from elsewhere).
# Self links (percentage of links to own blog).
# Other blogs (percentage of links to others blogs).
# Other links (percentage of links to other websites).

I definitely like the idea of “certificates” as a quick snapshot of what the blog “orator” you’re reading is like. Frequency and “verbiage” I would keep, but if I understand him aright, the links don’t quite do it for me.

Personally, what I’d want to see from the linky bit of the certificate is:
# a 3-number ratio of link posts vs commenting posts vs isolated posts, so I can get an idea of the style of the blog (connector, thinker, navel-gazer … and different combinations)
# some variance measures for the links in and out, so I can get an idea of how specialist the blog is.