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 respect Mary 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.
Wow Adina! You are on fire! Love the comments across the past four posts. And thanks for the compliment. Really appreciate your contributions to the community on your blog, too.
mary
This is a conversation I’ve wanted to have happen since Clay wrote the original Power Law post.
The power law is real. Rank metrics track the way that the most popular weblogs enter the domain of mass media.
But it ignores and hides a good part of the value of blogging, which is the conversation within subcommunities.
Thanks for instigating this conversation!
Blogrolling away
Adina Levin’s post on blog rank and popularity mentions “the male-centered link count, long-blogroll, weak-tie rankism.” I’m ignoring the “male-centered” part as irrelevant, but coincidentally I was staring at my blogroll today and thinking it’s obsole…
I thought its a really interesting conversation Mary has provoked, so i thought i’d send it thru anyways here …. thanks for picking up on my thoughts … i couldn’t agree more with you when you say you hate explicit rankings. Its one of the reasons why i’ve stopped playing in most SNS’s. And why I use Technorati not to assess rank but to discover conversations. It is in the context of conversations that sometimes build community that i liked Alok’s comment. Clouds and neighbourhoods maybe, instead of ratings and rankings?
I am 344, hear me roar
Feedster launched the Feedster Top 500 setting a new standard for length, the first salvo in the size matters war of microcontent. Go here and bitch about M2M isn’t on the list, but my crappy blog is, or if…
Network Map vs. Cocktail Party
Some of my friends, like Mary Hodder, Adina Levin and Mitch Ratcliffe have been talking about more fine-grained ways to rank blogs — and thereby, in a way, better ways to find interesting clusters of people. This reminds me of…
Network Map vs. Cocktail Party
Some of my friends, like Mary Hodder, Adina Levin and Mitch Ratcliffe have been talking about more fine-grained ways to rank blogs — and thereby, in a way, better ways to find interesting clusters of people. This reminds me of…
Network Map vs. Cocktail Party
Some of my friends, like Mary Hodder, Adina Levin and Mitch Ratcliffe have been talking about more fine-grained ways to rank blogs — and thereby, in a way, better ways to find interesting clusters of people. This reminds me of…