Look­ing back over my recent blog posts you may have noticed that each one rep­res­en­ted one of five dif­fer­ent styles of blog­ging. This was a delib­er­ate attempt by me to test them and to see if one was bet­ter received than the oth­ers. Let’s look a bit closer.

1: The Announce­ment, rep­res­en­ted by “Eng­lish­Voo­doo arrives!”.

2: The Report, rep­res­en­ted by “Wel­come to the world of tomor­row!”.

3: The Opin­ion, rep­res­en­ted by “Digital: the hard­back edi­tion”.

4: The List, rep­res­en­ted by “Five essen­tial skills for web design­ers”.

5: The Debate, rep­res­en­ted by “The death of digital”.

So which one was the most pop­u­lar?
This all depends on what you are meas­ur­ing and which meas­ure is more import­ant to you.

You can use ana­lyt­ics pack­ages to meas­ure quant­it­at­ive data: meas­ur­ing retweets using TweetM­eme, The death of digital scores highest; meas­ur­ing social media click­throughs using bit.ly, The death of digital wins again; and simply look­ing at the top con­tent meas­ure­ment in Google Ana­lyt­ics also places The death of digital in first place (after the home page of course). Can you see a pat­tern emerging?

You can also just look at the num­ber of com­ments for more data, but you really should meas­ure qual­it­at­ive data by look­ing at who the com­ments are from. Once again, The death of digital was the most pop­u­lar post so far and, for me, this meas­ure has more value than simple numbers.

Yes, raw quant­it­at­ive data can look good in a report, but you really have to under­stand what (and pos­sibly more import­antly, who) is gen­er­at­ing these num­bers to get real value from the data.

So, I would sug­gest that you meas­ure the response to each type of post you write to see which one(s) suits your chosen audi­ence — looks like my audi­ence likes a juicy debate …