BookBlog

Blog rank and popularity

On the other hand, I recoil from the implication by Dina Mehta that we should turn blog rank into an explicit, Orkut-like friend rating system.

I like this measure - "i enjoy their company" - maybe someone should use that as some form of index? There are some bloggers who come up with really 'popular' posts which get linked to heavily - they may be 'popular' in a mechanized sense, but it isn't always the case that they make for relevant reads most of the time. There's value in what Alok says as it may lend itself to a more holistic approach - if someone loves hanging out at your blog, enjoys your company through conversations there, that's the best measure for me. It is what builds my network and community in ways that are far more compelling than from just links I may generate.

Hmmm.... rereading Dina's post, it is not clear whether she is talking about implicit metrics and visualizations, or explicit rankings. I like the first idea and hate the second. This goes back to the critique of "friending" during the social network service fad. Explicitly declaring the emotional valence of a link or comment -- fondness, congeniality, prickliness, etc. is not socially a good thing.

Although, going back to the discussion that sparked this conversation about the differences between men's and women's patterns of relationship, this brings to mind a social pattern from girl society in grade school. Little girls have explicit friend ranking. A girl will say that Heather and Myra are my Best Friends. I used to be friends with Sarah but I don't like her any more. Girls compete explicitly to be friends with popular girls. Rank is bolstered by deranking girls who are less popular with mean gossip.

I suppose we could revolt against the male-centered link count, long-blogroll, weak-tie rankism by implementing an explicit, short-list, constantly changing, competitive "best friends" feature. Let's not.

On the other hand, it would be interesting for discovery services to reveal the strength of ties, through the pattern of interlinking and commenting among subcommunities. For example, at Socialtext, we did an analysis that showed the strong ties between the cross-disciplinary design team at Ziff Davis, and weak ties between the designers and the sales and marketing staff.

I would much rather reveal that I enjoy and respectMary Hodder's facilitation of the conversation about alternative blog metrics through the visualization of links to Mary's posts and cross-links to others in the conversation, than to rate Mary.