Wednesday 12 February 2003
Now this is interesting
This afternoon Dave Sifry (from Technorati) left a comment on my post, Stuck in the middle, again, pointing out that as a result of thinking about the multiplicity of responses to Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality essay, he’d come up with the Technorati Interesting Newcomers list:
Basically, I set the ranking algorithm to give more weight to people with a moderate link cosmos (but at least 40 bloggers are linking to them, so they have a reputation) who have said something that has caused a proportionately large number of new inbound links to come their way. Bloggers with a larger draw can still get on the list, but they have to add proportionately more links to their inbound link cosmos in order to do so.
I responded, suggesting that the Interesting Newcomers list and the Interesting Recent Blogs list would instantly become far more *interesting* if Dave filtered out all of the blogs on the Technorati Top 100 list.” (Yesterday I noticed that my weblog appeared on both the Newcomers and Recent Blogs lists and the same thing happened to Burningbird, which just didn’t seem right since neither of us are newcomers—though I’d like to think both of us are pretty interesting.)
Now Dave has written an explanation of the algorithm
he’s adopted to help negate some of the effects of the power law on the Interesting Recent Blogs and Interesting Newcomers lists.
I thought about the problem that this presented to a traditional link engine. When you rank bloggers simply by the number of people who link to them, you get a very static list of “a-list” bloggers, as shown by the Technorati Top 100. What I wanted to do was to break that power law, and give more exposure to the lesser known, but still interesting bloggers, especially on days when they stand out and do something interesting.
Even though I studied Pure and Applied Mathematics for a couple of years at university, that was a hundred years ago, so I don’t pretend to understand the math (though I did recall what a quadratic equation looks like).
What did please me was this:
For the Interesting Newcomers list, I simply cut out all of the bloggers who already have an audience - so you won’t see any a-list bloggers on that list, at least not once they become a-list. :-)
I have no idea whether Dave followed my advice (that’s neither important nor interesting), but the Interesting Newcomers list is now a lot more interesting than it was in mid-afternoon.
Of course, what’s really interesting is that just a few days after Clay Shirky published his essay, Dave Sifry has created a list designed—in Clay’s words—”to flag people with low overall link numbers, but who have done something to merit a sharp increase in links, as a way of making the system more dynamic.”
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Jonathon,
Your comments helped my thinking along and because of what you said, I made sure to exclude the "a-list" bloggers from the Technorati Newcomers list. Thanks for your advice and thoughts!
Dave
I noticed the change -- I'm off, but so are Chris Pirillo, megnut, Kottke, and Doc Searls, so I think you are getting closer to what you want.
I've refrained from commenting on all of this, for a number of reasons, but it seems that even this new change falls a little short of what you'd quoted Clay as saying. Dave's modifications -- as good as they are -- still use link quantity to identify "people with low overall link numbers, but who have done something to merit a sharp increase in links."
I think it's absolutely a step in the right direction, but it almost feels like using a word to define itself. How do you find things that are isolated out there, with little to no linkage, but probably merit a wider audience, if your definition of "merit" depends on how many other people think it's interesting, too?
Your currency is still links; the only change is that you've lowered the price of admission.
What if "interesting" isn't defined by how many people link to something, but by how often a site updates? Or the current "speed" of a site, based on some algorithm of number of recent entries compared to historical rate of chang? Or the number of words in a post? Or the frequency of certain words (quadratic equation, maybe) one or more posts? Or the title, or the category, or x, or y, or z.
Lots of different ways to attempt to answer the same question: show me something I haven't seen before. Interesting problem. Forthcoming solutions, to be sure, will be even more so.
Dave, thanks! Good to know I played a small part in the improvement.
Anita, it's definitely closer to what I'd like to see but I think that Robert makes a valid point when he suggests that we're placing too much reliance on links. There is, however, a strong body of opinion that regards links as the "gold standard" of blogging in the same way as they view an Academy Award as a reliable indicator of a good movie. It'll be fascinating to see how this develops.
Yeah, well, I'm still on there, except further down the list, I think. Does that mean I'm less interesting than I was a few days ago, or less of a newcomer?
Whatever. But after all this time (about two years, but it seems like longer) of howling into the void (or chuckling into it, depending on my mood), I reckon I'm not a newcomer, either, regardless of how deeply deeply interesting I am (err, no, wait - I mean how interesting my *site* is).
I'm with RKB on this, primarily in the sense that I agree that 'Interesting Newcomers' is a pretty inappropriate name for the generated list.
Regardless, it's good to see a list there with a lot more sites I'd never heard of, that are 'linkworthy' to someone.
This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed.
© Copyright 2002-2003 Jonathon Delacour
Jonathon,
Your comments helped my thinking along and because of what you said, I made sure to exclude the "a-list" bloggers from the Technorati Newcomers list. Thanks for your advice and thoughts!
Dave
Posted by: Dave Sifry on 13 February 2003 at 02:22 AM