Jason Calacanis called for it, Feedster did it.
OK, not exactly true. This is a conversation I (and others) have been having with Scott Rafer for a while, and there was quite a bit of pros and cons around releasing a Feedster Top 10/50/100/500. First and foremost, which criteria should be used: number of links, comments, trackbacks, clicks, post views, etc. ? In her now seminal post, Mary Hodder suggested a suite of metrics to leverage in order to offer a more comprehensive ranking algorithm. This is a great undertaking, that Feedster will no doubt support and participate to.
The last conversation I had with Scott on the subject was a few days ago, when I got a preview of the Feedster Top 500, was around a decay function that would weight differently links based on how recent they were (recognizing that a one year old link has less value than a link made one hour ago – IMHO).
As Scott says in his post, links aren’t a great proxy (i.e they’re insufficient) for ranking blogs, but they are a start, and the team counts on the community to make the algorithm evolve, and improve.
I also agree with the point of view expressed during BlogHerCon that a global ranking of blogs does not mean much, since different topics commend different levels of readerships.
Also, it is worth reminding that the different linking metrics differ across systems. Looking at Software Only (this blog), you get the following numbers (and yes, since I changed my URL a few months ago, they don’t reflect the “real” metric) :
- Technorati: 152 links from 98 blogs – based on the links found on the home page of blogs Technorati indexes
- Bloglines: 313 citations – based on the citations found in blogs cached in the Bloglines archive
- Feedster: 588 results – based on links found in feeds indexed by Feedster
Since the metric of reference is different, the result is different – and therefore only comparing the “link popularity” of blogs in one system (sort of) makes sense. Why (sort of) ? For example, some bloggers or publishers have elected to only publish summary feeds and/or omit links – which means that Feedster would not pick up links from these blogs.
Looking forward to your comments (Rafer explains how)… and remember that this is the first time this is released, so it is not supposed to be perfect and there is no need to get crazy and al.
Disclosure: I have made a small angel investment in Feedster a year ago.
More:
- Interesting comments to Jason’s post that will lead to some clarification from Feedster, no doubt
- Very funny "acceptance post" from Michael Bazeley
- Sad that we lost Susan along the way
since Blogger is not included(Rafer confirms in the comments that Blogger is included)