Valuable Content - Views and Social Signals

I just saw two posts by a couple of the nicest people out there:

• Nancy White - Most Viewed Posts First Quarter 2009 - What next?
• Bill Ives - Your Favorite Portals and KM Posts for Last Quarter and Last Year

Both posts look at page views of posts and use that as a proxy for what is good / interesting / valuable.

I've talked about the questionable nature of page views vs. other signals in posts such as: An Aha Moment - del.icio.us as Indicator of Valuable Content - Importantly My Content

Since my aha moment, I've always been skeptical of using page views. However, I've also come to realize that there are some limits with each different kind of social signal (e.g., delicious links, click throughs, page views, time on page, etc.).

Because both Nancy and Bill contribute to the Communities and Networks Connection and both have the keyword widget installed, I was able to see ...

Nancy's top ten posts for Q1 according to various social signals were:

1. Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience- Full Circle, March 23, 2009
2. CoP Series #6: Community Leadership in Learning- Full Circle, March 10, 2009
3. Twitter as Search Engine or Community Seed- Full Circle, March 6, 2009
4. CoP Series #5: Is my community a community of practice?- Full Circle, March 5, 2009
5. CoP Series #4: Practice Makes Perfect- Full Circle, March 3, 2009
6. CoP Series #9: Community Heartbeats- Full Circle, March 19, 2009
7. CoP Series #8: Content and Community- Full Circle, March 17, 2009
8. Tinkering and Playing with Knowledge- Full Circle, March 8, 2009
9. A humorous presentation of Blogs vs. Wikis- Full Circle, January 12, 2009
10. Red-Tails in Love: Birdwatchers as a community of practice- Full Circle, March 26, 2009

Bill's top ten posts for Q1 according to various social signals were:

1. Ten Ways to Track Your Online Reputation- Portals and KM, January 27, 2009
2. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Two - Content Monitoring- Portals and KM, March 10, 2009
3. McKinsey on Making Enterprise 2.0 Work is Reminder of Process Centric KM in Early 90s. - Portals and KM, March 18, 2009
4. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Four - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Potential New Approaches - Portals and KM, March 12, 2009
5. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Introduction- Portals and KM, March 9, 2009
6. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Five - Content Publishing and Archiving- Portals and KM, March 13, 2009
7. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Three - Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Current Approach- Portals and KM, March 11, 2009
8. Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers - Portals and KM, March 4, 2009
9. Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations- Portals and KM, February 23, 2009
10. Knowledge Management Twitterers- Portals and KM, March 31, 2009

While there is overlap with the most viewed, I think that the above lists represent a more accurate picture of what users found valuable.