strange currencies (or, community measurements re-imagined)

"You know with love come strange currencies"
R.E.M -- Strange Currencies
(since thinking about this post, I've had this song stuck in my head :S)

In going through the responses following the announcement of our feedback driven development process, I've been documenting the suggestions, bugs and the like to not only help out the test team, but also to help us determine what all we need to be doing.  Along the way, I've also been gathering some raw stats about our various sites/services.

1,879 tagged items
342 messages posted in forums
53 new blogs created

While gathering these stats though, I realized that this may appear to run counter to what I posted just the other day in response to Sean O'Driscoll's notion of thin contributors.  Indeed, in some ways it is contradictory in that the features around reporting in the new services are still being baked.  At the same time though, we have the foundation in place to readily surface key currencies in our new ecosystem.  Some draft manifestations of this include:

Key content -- items (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc) being tagged.  What do folks find interesting?

Weighting of key content -- frequency of a specific item (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc) being tagged.  What do people find most interesting?

Influentials --  identifying the individuals tagging those items (blogs, forums, blog posts, forum posts, kb articles, etc).  Additional identification of those individuals validating answers, questions, or bugs.  Who is playing a big role in our ecosystem?

Message/meme tracking -- identifying links to a particular item.  How far does a particular message spread?

Relative credibility of influentials -- does the history of an influential's actions make sense?  How do others perceive this individual?

Answer validation -- how many other agree that an answer really addresses the problem at hand?

Question / bug validation -- how many others encountered a particular question or bug as stated?

Notice how discussion above does not mention anything about visitors or page views?  While those data points still have their place, to more accurately measure the impact of community activity, we are building a series of solutions and services to capture that information. 

I realize that there isn't too much precedent for this sort of tracking.  Indeed, a recent study of community professionals by Forum One Communications (publishers of the Online Community Report), 62% of respondents said they did not collect content tagging metrics.  Given that the online community space has changed rapidly in just the last couple of years, I suppose this is understandable.  With tagging and other social services taking root though, it's about time that our reporting and stats caught up to all of the changes.

(xposted on my beta blog)