PostRank

The folks at AdvertisingAge released their latest Power150 list this morning, which now features the power of PostRank analysis!

There are already some noticeable changes in the listings, and we’re hoping our real-time analysis will keep the rankings current and interesting for a long time to come. Our congratulations to the bloggers on the list! (We’re not even playing favourites with the Canadians.)

The AdAge blog post has a great explanation of how and why they integrated PostRank into their analysis, and what it brings to the list and its rankings:

Why’s PostRank so great? For one, unlike other metrics, they provide real-time data. We’ll only be grabbing it once a day like any other metric, but you can be reasonably sure that your recent hot post will be accounted for. But here’s an even bigger reason: we have a specific time window. For each blog, we’re grabbing PostRank scores for only the previous 30 days, an intentionally small window of time. We wanted to make the Power 150 more dynamic and current, and, by basing 1/3 of your overall score on recent activity, we’re hoping this will affect rankings in three ways:

Level the playing field a bit. If you’re a king now, you could be demoted within 30 days. If you’re at the bottom, you could enter the upper reaches yourself within a month, if you do well enough. Of course, the latter still won’t be easy, but hopefully not the insurmountable task it once was, because recent successes will count for more and long-accrued success a little less.

Encourage people to keep up with their blogs. If you stop blogging for a month (as some of you have — tsk, tsk), your score will suffer. We don’t necessarily want to punish you for taking a break, but we think those who are still active and working should have an advantage.

Give a better picture of what’s happening now. We want the Power 150 to be a more dynamic place, a better reflection of the fluidity of conversations on the web rather than a calcified “Who’s Who.” It’s a pretty lofty goal, but this our best shot so far.

Additionally, there’s more information here, as well as a chance to win Power150 prizes!

We’re thrilled to be a key part of the Power150 analysis and list, and we hope we can help keep the list timely and relevant and help people even more to Read What Matters.

Delivering real-time social media analytics is one of the core infrastructure and technological pieces of our platform at AideRSS. We’re happy to announce that earlier this week we successfully migrated our systems to deliver exactly that: real-time monitoring of the most popular social media sites and platforms. (Press release.)

This means immediate feedback for PostRank scores as users are engaging with publishers’ content (faster and better discovery) and an immediate feedback loop for the publishers (to help them engage in new and ongoing conversations).

As part of the upgrade, we have also added a number of new sources to our platform:

Among the new additions are: Diigo, Feecle, Furl, Identica, Jaiku, BrightKite and MéxicoDiario. And of course, we are always working on adding new sites and improving our global coverage.

Real-time Authoritative Search

Over the course of past five years, online social networks, and a proliferation of socially-oriented tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogging, bookmarking and sharing sites, have transformed the Web from a technical infrastructure to a social platform, which is now often referred to as the Social Web.

Vik Singh, architect of the Yahoo! Search BOSS team, recently highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities that this change has brought forward:

One emerging area of search that I think no one has really solved is real-time authoritative search. When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.

Later in his Q&A, Vik also highlights PostRank as a potential and promising solution to the problem he outlines. The combination of real-time social media monitoring and PostRank analysis provides a great a signal for the new and upcoming stories as they develop. Want to give it a try? Try our BOSS+PostRank mashup:

BOSS + PostRank

To get started simply type in a query (e.g. yahoo), select news, and click search. To power the search, we use the BOSS Mashup framework to retrieve the latest stories from around the web, and then apply a PostRank filter on top – stories with the highest engagement have the highest scores and are displayed first in the list. You can preview the story, click on the PostRank score to view some of the metrics behind it, and even see the filtered out stories at the bottom of the page:

The combination of BOSS and PostRank APIs is a great demonstration of leveraging the data generated in the Social Web. Give it a try (boss.postrank.com), and let us know on your thoughts and suggestions.

The Ubiquity team at Mozilla recently launched a new homepage for their project which features a really interesting integration of Yahoo Pipes and PostRank API to identify the most influential posts. Instead of using a numeric score, the engagement of the story is visualized as an underline with the help of color and length - neat!

For those of you who are not familiar with Ubiquity, make sure to check out the video summary, it’s an amazing Firefox extension which can streamline your day to day browsing experience.

On that note, we’re also big fans of the project and have built a couple of custom commands, one of which you can now install in your browser: preview top posts of any page with a single command! To get started, click on the link, and follow the instructions to install the command. Once the script is installed, simply navigate to any website with an RSS feed, open your Ubiquity prompt, and type in “top” to preview the most influential stories from that site! Easy as that.

Let us know how it works, and if you have any suggestions for other commands you’d like to see.

The latest PostRank API library was released recently by Declan Whelan. He commented on some personal education goals he had in completing the exercise:

AideRSS provides a service that ranks online content such as RSS feeds, blog posts and so on. I have always been impressed with AideRSS and wanted to educate myself with writing REST interface logic, ASP.Net and Web 2.0 in general. AideRSS also provides a PostRank API to their service so I decided to write a .NET client wrapper for this API to make it easier to use.

A great addition to our API library. Thanks, Declan!

We’re big fans of JQuery at AideRSS - it makes Javascript a fun language to work with (after years of painful experiences)! A great example of which is Alf Eaton’s recent blog post about creating a custom AideRSS Top Posts widget with JQuery. Instead of using our default widget, Alf shows how to interface with our top posts API and create a custom styled list of stories.