mSpoke’s Chief Scientist Paul Ogilvie has the first post up in a series of research he’s doing focsuing on what makes a blog post popular. The first analysis looks at reading difficulty as a predictor of popularity. His conclusion follows, but go read the entire post:

When I set out to write this post, I hoped to find some interesting correlations between feed item popularity and other features of the feed items. I wasn’t naive enough to believe I’d find strong correlations, but I was hoping to confirm some common sense wisdom. This post looked into some crude surface features of reading difficulty and post length in an attempt to understand whether a “well-written” post is more likely to be popular than poorly written posts. I failed to find any correlations between these features and popularity. Does that mean that I personally believe that the writing of the post doesn’t matter? Absolutely not.

I’ve really enjoyed talking about this research with Paul. Hopefully, you’ll subscribe to mSpoke’s Blog feed and follow along.