At PostRank we have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about how to help publishers identify where their audiences are engaging. However, the converse is also a very interesting question: as a consumer, which sites should you engage with to find like-minded communities of people and relevant content?
Earlier today, Alex Kosorukoff (Chief Scientist at StumbleUpon) posted some really interesting data analysis he performed over the weekend using PostRank’s Metrics API:
“I took a sample of 2169 urls pulled from about 200 feeds in my google reader. Those feeds cover a pretty diverse set of topics, including science, engineering, entrepreneurship, business, management, psychology, legal, photography, music, humor, lifestyle, etc. I pulled the Postrank metrics for each of those urls into a user engagement matrix. Each row of the matrix represents a url information, and each column has values of a single engagement metric (e.g. number of posts on twitter) across all the 2169 urls. I computed the Pearson correlation between every pair of columns. This resulted in a matrix visualized below.”
The Pearson correlation matrix above highlights that certain sites tend to exhibit similar behaviours, which is arguably not surprising. Some of this, as Alex points out, can be attributed to data exchange between the different sites, but just as likely, it simply shows that no matter what tool we prefer (e.g. Delicious or Diigo for bookmarking), not surprisingly, we tend to engage with similar content. So, no matter if you are a publisher or a consumer, you could either discover more like-minded people, or a wider audience for your content, if you continue to explore different networks — a win-win.
The topic of Human Based Computation (HBS) is an incredibly interesting one to explore and it is always exciting to see intriguing studies and results in the space. Check out Alex’s post (“Mapping the social web with PostRank“), and let us know if you have other interesting results or applications of this data! Social search, discovery, collaboration, gaming, and the list goes on — the Social Web is a deep well of ideas to explore and improve on.