For those interested in peeking behind the curtain here at PostRank, we’ve put together a high level architectural whitepaper that describes our backend systems that power the applications you know so well – Feed Filtering, Topics, Blog Discovery and recently Analytics. What you may not know is the technical rigor required to ingest the blogosphere, pervasively monitor social media and correlate them both in real-time.
Our Architectural Overview of the PostRank Engagement System intends to define what we are doing and why. While this paper will not go into specific technical details of how we build our stuff and scale it out across Amazon’s EC2 cloud, we are setting the context for our system, defining what we calculate and how. (We’ll geek out about some of the challenges and lessons of building and scaling our stuff a bit later, you can be sure.) For those that are interested in how Social Engagement is calculated, this is the document for you.
Social Engagement is an evolving concept. We’ve been talking to advertising agencies and networks, marketers, researchers, public relations, news sites, media companies and analytics platforms. Across the board they all have highly variable and interesting points of view on what engagement is, how useful it is and what to do with it.
We’d love to get your take on our approach and especially hear what you would do with content and engagement data since the real-time content stream, social engagement monitoring, and two years of archival data are available as part of our Data Services products. We want to hear your ideas. Let’s Get Started.