I appreciate the prompt reply!

Thanks for putting out the one critical mis-step in my thinking: Defining what a *Blog* is.

It would be far from perfect, but perhaps even a rough definition would be suitable enough: such as a website that pings blog search tools like Technorati and has an RSS feed – would be more useful enough?

Of course, like I mentioned this method probably excludes other blog-ish activities like folks who write on Facebook, MySpace and Yelp, just to name a few.

As for: “The capabilities exist in many analytics programs where you can apply a custom segmentation and slice off “blogs” and get the metrics you are looking for. It would be cool.”

Definitely, but I was wondering about a more automated process, like the Technorati API call you mentioned or similarly from Google Blog Search.

Maybe there is a easy way and we can say *.blogspot.* and *.wordpress.* is a blog. Or maybe a api lookup into technorati to pick up sites that it identifies as blogs (but remember technorati will index pretty much any site that pings it).

The capabilities exist in many analytics programs where you can apply a custom segmentation and slice off “blogs” and get the metrics you are looking for. It would be cool.

For example for my blog I just pulled off the key stats for a top referring blog (veen.com/jeff) and these two views help me understand exactly what that traffic is doing (and as bonus points it automatically computes comparisions with other site traffic):

Top blog referral: Overall Site Stats:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/occams_razor_for_daniel-site_stats.png

Top blog referral: Conversion Rate Metrics:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/occams_razor_for_daniel-conversion.png

Both of the above are from Google Analytics, but you can do them with Matt’s program as well.

-Avinash.