PubSub’s 10%
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, ever since Brad emailed me about it. There new blog ranking system in town. For the last few months, I’ve been quietly using PubSub to keep track of links back to this blog, just to know who’s reading. I didn’t know that for most of that time they hadn’t “released” (gone public) yet. What I also didn’t know was just how PubSub compiles their data. They do it a bit differently.
Relying on a nightly analysis of Web feeds, PubSub calculates which blogs are the most influential, which are getting the most number of links, and which links come from the most influential sites.
Beyond that, PubSub provides a detailed set of data that shows, for each site referred to from a feed, for each day, how many people linked to that site, how many people linked out and how many entries were created on that site.
“We compute ranks on a daily basis,” said CTO and Cofounder Bob Wyman. “We don’t do what everybody else does: We don’t just count up links to a site and say the guy with the most links has the most popular site. The reason is we have to recognize that not all links are created equal. A link from a popular and influential site is much more valuable than from a site nobody’s every heard of.”
The page ranking system Google uses to figure out the relevant of pages uses much the same logic, Wyman said.
PubSub also pays attention to a few other factors. On a particular day, if one site links to another multiple times, the service doesn’t rank subsequent links as high as the first link. The reason for that, said Wyman, is that if someone links within a story, they’ll typically link multiple times as they point to various aspects of the same site.
Also, new links are given higher ranking than older links. So as a link ages, its value is discounted.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been getting a daily report of the last 30 days activity on my blog. Each previous day’s report goes right to my RSS reader. So, It didn’t take me long to run a quick check when Brad told me that my blog was in the top 10% of 16 million-plus blogs that PubSub tracks. (See image above.)
From what I can tell based on the last 30 day report, that’s pretty much true on most days.
Technorati Tags: blogs
October 5th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
not so sure about that one.
Of course if all entries are as systematically wrong as they are with mine, I guess that is accurate.
But i know I have more links then they report, they report the number of entries completely incorrectly and the outlinks are always 0. Wrong on all counts.
Maybe my feed is screwed up? but then, again.. a problem with these ranking sites.