Adina Levin takes the conversation on blog metrics to Conversation Clouds, where she articulates beautifully how it makes much more sense to reveal  "a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation."   

"You can start with a participant (the url of a person's weblog), or a search term (a word or tag) Nodes are clustered based on closeness, measured by number of links and reverse links over a period of time (comments, too, if you can measure them).  If the picture starts with a link, then that link is at the center of the picture. The picture shows the links between the first node and the other nodes, and between other nodes that are connected to each other. If the picture starts with a word, topic, or tag search, then the cloud contains a cluster of blogs that include the term or tag in the last time period. The picture shows lines between blogs that link to each other. Unlinked blogs are thrown out.

The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month, six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps you re-center around that blog's conversations. If you click on a tag or topic, you search based on that. You'd need to experiment with several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud.

This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities."

I think this would very nicely integrate values that I hold important in blog conversations - relevance, integrity and credibility, interest and empathy generated, stretch in teasing boundaries, intimacy with my audience, respect and amicability - rather than blog rankings and ratings.  Making 'invisible' conversations and clusters and communities of interest visible as a result.  I'd love to see comments at posts integrated into these clouds in some way too, as many who comment donot necessarily blog, and often the comments enrich the thought in a post much more.   

Adina ends her post with a good action point :

"The next step is to test this idea, maybe with a manually drawn picture, and then with a dataset and a toolkit like TouchGraph. This seems like a good experiment to me. It could be somebody's done this already. Or somebody's tried this and proved that it doesn't work. Please share if you know."

Do drop in your thoughts at Adina's post or here.

I also remember reading Anjo Anjewierden's series of posts on Visual Settlements in Weblogs, which looked at linking patterns in communities of bloggers.  And led to the development of Blog Trace.  In a comment on the post on Anjo's post on Visual Settlements, Michael Migurski suggests :

"The layout of the town is important too - cities often grow in a radial fashion. If your site is categorized by topic, each distinct topic might be a development push in some direction away from the city center. As posts are commented, pinged, tracked back, or responded to, their representative buildings develop into dense towers. The categories that are growing the fastest will be easy apparent, spatially."

It might be interesting then to build these visual settlements around conversation clouds - key words, tags, posts or entire blogs. 

UPDATE : See Mitch Ratcliffe's Cloudmakers R Us :

"I've been following this discussion, mostly holding my tongue because it may look self-serving to respond with "here are the pictures you want of blog relationships" by pointing at the MyDensity site we've put together to show off the social analysis tools built by Persuadio. I also realize it would be incorrect, as we've focused on the big picture to the detriment of a small world.  Simply put, like many of the indexers, we've tried to capture the role of any blog or Web site in any conversation (being about more than blogs has been important to us from the very beginning)."

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