Measurements of engagement aren't necessarily measurements of interest.
Tipped off by a post on RWW, I installed the Postrank extension for Firefox on Google reader yesterday. Postrank adds a number next to each post which is a composite of “how engaging” the post has been, e.g whether it’s been clicked, bookmarked, commented on, or even inspired new posts. This number can be between 1 and 10, where 10 is the most engaging post and 1 is the least.
What’s was immediately interesting was how few of my starred stories qualify on Postrank as “great” posts. I started looking into this and the trend that I began to see was that the top posts tend to be ones that are about the immediate present and are about the web, or social media or web tools.
Among the least “engaging” stories are many of the larger stories that are, to me, more interesting but less immediately practical
This story for example on Intel’s innovation which scored a fairly poor 1.6 (although I have just theoretically improved that) was one of the more interesting things I’ve read lately. Unlike almost everyone else, Intel has decided not to retrench and instead wants to use the recession to actually move ahead faster. In doing so they’re going to obsolete themselves. This press release goes into more detail with some great quotes from Craig Barrett:
“In the current global economic climate, thinking long-term is more important than ever,” Barrett said. “Today, we can lay the groundwork for growth. Many nations and businesses try to save their way out of a recession. It is much better to invest our way out.”
Barrett believes that investing in new ideas and inventions not only stimulates job creation, but also increases productivity, leads to new forms of energy and smarter energy consumption, improves health care and medicines, and gives consumers more benefits for less cost.
The thing is I don’t actually think I’m that different, I don’t think it’s that I’m just interested in different things than most people. I think a lot of people found this news interesting, it’s that these types of posts aren’t things that we’re going to interact with physically, because they’re designed to make us think.
This is a cousin to the popularity problem that I wrote about before and which Noah wrote about this weekend. There are structures that the we use on the Web that are designed to surface the most interesting information that often end up actually hiding it.
I think that this problem also extends to other kinds of engagement measurements, particularly those that try to assess the effectiveness of marketing communications. When people click on virals, pass them on, or bookmark them, it does not immediately also mean that they find them interesting. They are clearly finding them useful, but that use may simply be as an object to continue a relationship with their friends rather than as a tool for making or forming an impression about a brand or product.