Via Graham Steel, part of an abstract New metrics for blog mining by Brian Ulciny et al. from a journal called Vistology:

“In order to monitor blogging about important events, we must develop models and metrics that represent blogs correctly. The structure of blogs requires new techniques for evaluating such metrics as the relevance, specificity, credibility and timeliness of blog entries. Techniques that have been developed for standard information retrieval purposes (e.g. Google’s PageRank) are suboptimal when applied to blogs because of their high degree of exophoricity,quotation, brevity, and rapidity of update. In this paper, we offer new metrics related for blog entry relevance, specificity, timeliness and credibility that we are implementing in a blog search and analysis tool for international blogs. This tools utilizes new blog-specific metrics and techniques for extracting the necessary information from blog entries automatically, using some shallow natural language processing techniques supported by background knowledge captured in domain-specific ontologies.”

The paper examines blogs reporting on news and current affairs, which make the assignment of automated metrics for subjective factors such as credibility, reliability, objectivity and so on very difficult, I would think, in addition to the easier to assign (?) factors such as timeliness and number of links.

I am not familiar with the term “vistology”, but it sounds intriguing.