We think they’re pretty engaging folks, and we think you’ll think so, too. And hey, if you think you’d make a great featured blogger, drop us a line and let us know!

To kick things off, we’re starting with one of our most lively engaged communities — the wine bloggers. These folks are active, supportive, knowledgeable, and really friendly. We selected Tom Wark and his Fermentation blog, which won the Biggest Mover & Shaker honours in the Wine category in our 2009 Top Blogs. Tom thoughtfully and astutely answered a few questions for us, and so, on with the show!

PostRank: You cover a wide variety of topics, from profiles/interviews to legal issues in the industry. Do you have a specific map or strategy of what you want to write about, or is it more a case of what you’re currently finding interesting and relevant (or somewhere in between)?

TW: I don’t create a schedule for what will be published on FERMENTATION and I never have. In general, my readers see what is interesting to me at the moment. That said, the common thread is always wine and, because I’m in the wine business, there is generally a connection to the business of wine. There are, however, areas that I do like to cover on a fairly regular basis. I want to introduce my audience to really good wine bloggers so I try to do at least one interview a week with a wine blogger whose voice I find compelling. Beyond that, what gets written about is what’s on my mind.

PostRank: Your blog has been around since November 2004. What would you say is the most significant way it’s evolved or changed in the succeeding years?

TW: Structurally my blog has changed in order to accommodate advertising on it. That’s mean providing room “above the fold” for companies that want FERMENTATION readers to take note of them. Beyond that little about the actual blog has changed other than its increase in readers that have led to more robust conversations in the comments area.

PostRank: Do you think your professional expertise in public relations gives you an edge in building and promoting your blog and audience?

TW: At the very least I think my time working in PR has honed my ability to spot a promotional opportunity. More importantly, having something of a presence in the wine industry already gave me the kind of initial credibility that would lead someone else in the wine industry to look at my blog a first time. I’ve used the occasional press release to draw attention to the blog, too. Finally, I think my visibility with professional wine writers has led to me having more opportunities to be a source for stories about wine blogs and alternative wine media. This, in turn, has led to more promotional opportunities coming my way.

PostRank: The folks whose blogs are in our Wine topic are some of the most engaged, supportive, and active communities we have. Any insights into what makes wine bloggers a tight-knit group?

TW: Interestingly, the wine industry itself has been a very collegial one since I’ve been a part of it. It’s almost clubby. The Wine Blogging community has evolved to have a very similar quality to it. In addition, I think things like the Wine Bloggers Conference and the American Wine Blog Awards have inspired wine bloggers to watch each other more closely and to interact. This translates into support. Finally, what’s at stake in what gets written about is rarely controversial. Bloggers talk a lot about whether rating scales are good, whether there’s too much alcohol in wine, which wines they like and don’t, what events are worth attending, how social media affects the world of wine. It’s not like we are debating affirmative action or the merits of a bank bailout. I think the subject matter you find on blogs is such that it encourages support among bloggers.

PostRank: Do you find it easy to balance writing about your own experiences and interests with topics that are trendy or current in the wine world in general, or do you find that there’s a lot more fodder in one area or the other?

TW: Everything I write about is opinion. I rarely attempt to educate. And if it’s not opinion you’ll be reading on my blog, then you’ll be reading my personal account of my interaction with my own interests and life in general and how wine intersects with it. In the end, most bloggers will get to the “trendy” stories. Some are so juicy you can’t resist. When the Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America announced that Sarah Palin will keynote their convention, well, it’s hard to resist blogging about that. But in general, what is on my mind in the morning is what gets written about on the blog, whether the subject is trendy or obscure. And I really don’t mind “obscure”.

PostRank: Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV won the other two Special Mention honours in the Wine topic for our Top Blogs of 2009, yet he’s not consistently #1 in the topic. Do you think that’s because readers of wine blogs look for a fair bit of variety in their reading?

TW: Gary is a busy guy. New baby. New company. Books… and of course WinelibraryTV.com. If he isn’t #1 over at PostRank it’s because he has his focus on one of the many areas where he has interests. I think it’s pretty clear that Gary is the most watched, listened to and interesting member of the wine blog/alternative wine media world.

PostRank: Your blog, Fermentation, won the Mover & Shaker award, which means you had the highest growth in audience engagement in 2009. Did you start the year with an intentional strategy to grow your audience and engagement, or was it just a matter of working hard and writing well?

TW: I like to think it’s the latter, working hard and writing well. I take seriously the “Daily” in “Fermentation: The Daily Wine Blog“. I’m also blessed with the ability to write fast and organize my thoughts fairly quickly, so keeping up the “Daily” part isn’t has hard for me as it might be for others. I’m guessing the prolific quality of my blog had a lot to do with receiving the “Mover & Shaker” award.

PostRank: Any advice or encouragement to wine bloggers who are starting out or working on finding their voice or niche?

TW: Yes. If you want to start a blog to reach an audience beyond your friends and co-workers you likely will fail — unless you actively market and promote your blog and unless you write on a very regular schedule — numerous times per week. Also, it’s important for potential bloggers to answer the question: “Can I say something original that isn’t just my opinion and that has likely already been expressed by someone else?” If you can’t, then my advise is to stay a reader and not get into blogging.

And there you have it. Many thanks from the PostRank team to Tom for taking the time to engage with us. Head on over to Fermentation and let us know what the most interesting thing is that you learn!

Whether your favourite sport involves flying through the air or gliding down the ice, we want to help you keep up with all the best Olympic coverage with our Olympics 2010 topic. Want to know everything that’s going on, or are you just passionate about one sport? We have a big Olympic feed with all the sources we can find, as well as separate topics by sport.

Each day during the Olympics, we’ll be blogging from the podium, so to speak, presenting virtual gold, silver, and bronze medals in engagement for the previous day’s Olympic content. And after the closing ceremonies, we’ll be awarding overall bragging rights to the sites that garnered the most social media engagement from their audiences over the course of the 2010 Winter Games.

We’ve also put together an Olympic Twitter account and Twitter lists if you prefer your news and social interaction bite-sized. We have an overall Olympics list, and separate lists by sport. You can find those on our PostRank Twitter lists page.

But just like those Olympic athletes we’ll be cheering on, we can’t do it alone. We need your help to make the PostRank Olympic topics the best they can be! There are 15 sports in the Games, and athletes participating from over 80 nations. And let’s not forget the Olympic-related organizations, news coverage, and other commentary that’ll be going on.

There’s a lot of content out there, and while we’re working hard to gather up and organize as much of it as we can, collectively you know way more than we do. If you know of an Olympic athlete, commentator, news site, country’s team, or Olympic-related organization we don’t have in our topics or Twitter lists yet, let us know at olympics@postrank.com and we’ll add it right away. Content from outside North America is especially welcome. (It doesn’t have to be in English; it just needs to have an associated RSS feed.)

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games are gonna be great, and we don’t want you to miss a moment!

Make sure you’re included!

How Will the Rankings Work?

PostRank tracks reader engagement with content by measuring what happens with articles and stories. We monitor 20 social sites across the web where readers create, critique, chat, collect and click. For each engagement event a weighting factor is applied based on the level of engagement that event suggests.

Individual story engagement is then rolled up and a total engagement score for the site is used for the ranking. It’s a truly remarkable signal that indicates how engaging and influential a publisher is. (Learn more: About PostRank, About Engagement.)

Help Us Curate the Lists

To make sure our topics reflect the best publishers and content out there, we want your help. Every day we work hard to make sure we track the best quality and most engaging publishers on the web. But you, the actual members of these communities, can make sure we haven’t let something slip through the cracks.

Anyone can add new sites to our system. And any registered user can add sites to specific topics. Please visit your topics of interest and add the ones you feel should be there. Could be your own, or someone of whose writing you’re a fan. Let your communities know, too, so they can make sure they’re represented.

You can browse all available topics or search by topic name in the search field on the postrank.com homepage.

Adding a new site to our system is as easy as entering it into the search field on postrank.com. (Please note, however, that to be added to our system, a site does need to have a valid RSS feed.) To add an existing site/feed to a topic, you’ll need to create an account. Fortunately, that’s easy as pie.

Then you can use the search field to find a specific topic in the drop-down results — just start typing. Or select it from the All Topics page.

To Add a Site to a Topic

1. On the right sidebar of the topic page, click the Manage button.
2. On the Topic Management page, type or enter the new site’s URL into the Add Feed field. If it’s in our system, it will appear in the drop-down list.
3. If the feed isn’t in our system yet, just add it in the search field on the homepage, and it should appear in a minute or two.
4. Click the green plus sign button to the right of the site’s listing to add it to the topic’s feed list.
5. Click the Save Changes button at the top of the screen to save the update.

Voila! You’re done. To see where the new site is in the topic’s rankings, click the Feeds link in the right sidebar to see the topic’s full list of sites. If you have any trouble, let us know.

Find Out How You’re Doing Now

If you’re already in our system you might want to see how you’re doing in detail. Check out PostRank Analytics! Get a snapshot view of the last 30 days of your site’s engagement with the PostRank Analytics Tour.

And for 2010, keep working hard on creating great content, discovering where your audience is, seeing how they engage with that content, and growing your community and influence to make yours a Top Blog!

Resources

• PostRank Logo location: http://blog.postrank.com/images/PostRank_logo.png
• Top Blogs 2009 badge location: http://blog.postrank.com/images/topblogs_2009.png
• PostRank.com homepage: http://postrank.com
• PostRank All topics page: http://postrank.com/all_topics
• PostRank Analytics Tour: http://analytics.postrank.com/tour
• About PostRank: http://postrank.com/postrank
• About Engagement: http://analytics.postrank.com/docs/engagement

It’s great to work with such a well-known publisher and see PostRank engagement data used to bolster offline traditional media analysis in such an important way. We think it’s a great example of how traditional media is looking forward and seeing how the social web can be valuable in performing research, expanding reach, and keeping relevant to their audiences.

From the case study, a bit more about Atlantic Wire’s goals and intentions with The Atlantic 50 project:

With the Atlantic 50, The Atlantic Wire intends to be the go-to op-ed page by aggregating the latest opinions from a defined set of opinion makers, found across the web. There is so much opinion out there, in blogs and on mainstream media sites like newspapers’ and magazines’ online properties. The Atlantic 50 is intended to appeal to an educated, media literate audience who read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and similar publications, but simply don’t have time for thorough reading, including the op-ed page, every day.

The Atlantic Wire team has framed current political commentary in two ways, as a result. Readers can browse by topic and see what’s currently “hot” among pundits and their audiences. These are stories on the topics currently getting the most engagement from online information consumers like themselves. From healthcare to the economy, it’s to find out what’s being talked about, and what different folks’ take on the issues are.

Additionally, the opinion makers of The Atlantic 50 are ranked by the amount of engagement their content is currently receiving. The list is updated regularly, so where they fall in the rankings in a result of how their audiences are reading, organizing, sharing, and responding to their commentary, rather than being based on editorial judgment or assessment of political leanings.

Keep your eye on The Atlantic Wire and, whether you lean left, right, or just love great online news and opinion coverage, let us know what you think of The Atlantic 50.

Read up on local companies that are changing the world and doing business building technologies in wide-ranging specialties, from healthcare, to robotics, to wildlife conservation.

And, of course, PostRank has some excellent coverage, with the snazzy ad James developed on page 28, a majestic photo of Carol on page 19, and the PostRank profile on page 66.

Check it out and get to know us and our brainy, hip, world-changing neighbours, too.

PS. On page 24 there’s a guy who installs radio transmitters in fish bellies. Seriously.

It’s often a gamble to run with an unconference style, but with that room and the excellent facilitation the board filled up quick. It was great to connect with so many great people in one place. 

The discussions were many and engaging and it was great to meet folks in person and put real faces to names (or avatars).

Highlights for us were the update on Pubsubhubub, critiquing Echo, the latest in comment systems from js-kit, and getting glimpses of new moves from Pheedo.

PostRank ramped up to the event with a pair of blog posts, the first: Architecting the Real-Time Web, followed up by: Filtering the Real-Time Web.

We’re excited to participate in this conversation and look forward to talking about filtering with social engagement data. If you have thoughts or ideas in this area we’d love to hear about it!

We’ve just made a PDF version of Architecture & Filtering Technologies for the Real-Time Web, so check it out and let us know what you think.

And when we can all have a drink and enjoy some tasty food, all the better!

To that end, the PostRank team will be at a few events this fall, and we’d love to see you!

Blog World Expo
Las Vegas, NV — Oct. 15-17

Carol and Jim will be at Blog World, and you’ll also find us at Jason Falls’ Mall Bar Tweetup on Thursday evening from 8 to 9pm. Come out and meet some of the coolest bloggers around!

ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit
Mountain View, CA — Oct. 15

We’re sponsoring ReadWriteWeb’s first event, which Jim and Ilya will be attending, and are looking to connect with folks about all things real-time web. Let’s have a drink on Wednesday or Thursday evening. Or come chat with us over lunch, where we’ll have assorted resources available to show you how PostRank works, and what our Real-Time APIs can do for your application.

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit
Washington, DC — Oct. 19-23

Carol will be attending this eMetrics event, and would love to chat about how your business is tackling online marketing and measurement, how you’re seeing your customer relationships evolve, and what kinds of challenges you’re facing.

ad:tech New York
New York, NY — Nov. 4-6

Carol and Jim will be hitting the Big Apple to connect with brands, agencies, publishers and service providers. What are the current top trends? Are social media initiatives demonstrating measurable ROI? What can real-time, context sensitive data do for you and your clients? So much to delve into, might need another bottle of wine…

Defrag Conference 2009
Denver, CO — Nov. 11-12

We’re sponsoring Defrag as well, and Carol, Jim and Ilya will be attending. Ilya will be presenting on “The Distributed Web”, and we’d love to talk to folks about audiences, engagement, and super-charging your publishing efforts.

So don’t be shy — let us know if you’ll be at any of these events, and we’d love to connect! (Dinner or drinks are on us, and word is there’ll be snazzy t-shirts, too…)

Huzzah!

Here at PostRank the concept of audience engagement is second nature to us, and we’re excited by the fact that one of the world’s largest advertisers understands that the quality of community, not just the quantity, is something that should be measured and rewarded.

It’s no secret that advertising on the web is an inexact science at best, and that pageviews have been the key measure of where advertisers place their bets. It’s also no secret that figuring out how to measure the ROI of social media has become a scorching hot topic with no clear answer.

While we weren’t sure how it would all shake out, two years ago we anticipated the importance of tracking and measuring discrete social engagement activities with online content across the web. It enabled us to figure out which publishers had the most engaging content and actively engaged audiences. Two years later we’ve got the evidence to show that the rise of social hubs as places where strong communities live and grow means that pageviews are only part of the story.

Think about it this way: in the world of sales, pageviews are analagous to the number of people walking through the door. They come in, they have a look around, and if you dazzle them with fancy endcaps or appealing displays, they might spend more money than intended. What you don’t know though, is whether it was a drive-by experience, or one driven by loyalty. And since building loyalty with customers is one of the strongest channels to long-term revenue, why wouldn’t an advertiser want to go to those places where they know loyal communities exist? 

It’s about connecting with the right people who want to hear the message, driving down the cost of each sale and driving up the average dollar value of each transaction.

We think it’s high time that advertisers started to look at audience engagement with online content as a key driver of revenue. By understanding how deeply a publisher is connected with readers and measuring that loyalty through specific engagement activities wherever they happen on the web, advertisers will get more bang for their marketing buck.

Based on what we know so far, the engagement criteria P&G is using is a step in the right direction, and we applaud it. However, engagement involves a vast array of interactions that goes well beyond measuring video views, sign-ups for newsletters, and playing games directly on a publisher’s site.

At PostRank, we know that 80% of a publisher’s engaged audience is commenting, tweeting, bookmarking, recommending, and doing myriad other things with the publisher’s content somewhere else on the web (i.e. not on the publisher’s site). P&G and others like them need to extend their view of how to reach loyal audiences and we challenge them to widen the net to include the kind of engagement analytics that PostRank has built its business around collecting.

The site went live this week, and serves as an up-to-the-minute resource that people can slice and dice by opinion maker or by a range of hot social debate topics, like climate change and healthcare reform. The Atlantic Wire “What is it?” page describes the Atlantic 50 bloggers, columnists, and pundits as their “all-star team”, pared down from an initial list of 400 people, using the criteria of Influence, Reach, and Web Engagement.

PostRank’s involvement is in Web Engagement. We provided 12 months of engagement metrics — comments, bookmarks, tweets, tags, votes, etc. — to give Atlantic Media an in-depth picture of which voices were being heard and amplified. When mixed with old fashioned surveying and interviews around Washington, trends emerged on which bloggers were up and coming voices, which ones were consistently well-engaged with their audiences, and which had waning influence.

The goal of the Atlantic 50 is to provide up-to-the-minute commentary on the relevant issues of the day, from the economy to the environment to the raging health care debate. The list centralizes leading thinkers and writers on these topics, enabling audiences to get a well-rounded view of issues to accompany their news consumption. As many of the Atlantic 50 are bloggers, readers can also weigh in with their own comments on posts. 

There is certainly plenty of controversy about who is on the list and who is not, as well as who is above whom, but ultimately readers will be the judge.

Lyn Headley, a PhD candidate at UCSD, shared one positive comment:

Well I for one am impressed. What interests me is the attempt you’ve made to achieve a new kind of “objectivity” in online journalism. You’ve made a sustained effort to combine strong editorial judgment with more automated forms of authority measurement. The result is a unique perspective on the national discourse. Of course your “in house methodology” is probably idiosyncratic but I don’t see that as a negative. Nobody expects a perfect mirror of anything, and some kind of bias is inevitable. I’d like to see more experiments like this combining different measures of authority and editorial judgment.

This dovetails well with the general evolution of journalism, which is getting much less one-to-many and more many-to-many, though it can be strongly argued that well-informed, critically thinking, authoritative voices are still an important part of the dissemination of news and opinion. PostRank is excited to help with this project, and we look forward to how it evolves to help people “read what matters” to them.

Red Canary has posted a feature called Hot Starts in Waterloo Region (which actually includes a couple of Guelph companies, too), featuring 16 local startups that the fine Canary folks think are pretty sexy (or at least potentially sexy…).

You can vote for your favourites in five categories:

• Most Likely to Win BIG
• Best Tech Team
• Best Leadership
• Best Product
• Best Place to Work

There’s no “Best Community Manager” category, but I like to think that’s because they didn’t think I even had the slightest bit of competition for that particular tiara…

While we’re not above shamelessly pandering for votes around here, we also really like all the folks we know at the other companies, so the competition is pretty friendly. (And besides, we locals ain’t gonna let no fancy Toronto website pit us against each other, dagnabbit!) That said, if we come out on top in a category or five, it certainly would make for some purdy bragging rights on our website.

And would help dull the pain of our less than triumphant showing at the annual Tech Capital Foosball Tournament…