Whether your favourite sport involves flying through the air or gliding down the ice, we want to help you keep up with all the best Olympic coverage with our Olympics 2010 topic. Want to know everything that’s going on, or are you just passionate about one sport? We have a big Olympic feed with all the sources we can find, as well as separate topics by sport.

Each day during the Olympics, we’ll be blogging from the podium, so to speak, presenting virtual gold, silver, and bronze medals in engagement for the previous day’s Olympic content. And after the closing ceremonies, we’ll be awarding overall bragging rights to the sites that garnered the most social media engagement from their audiences over the course of the 2010 Winter Games.

We’ve also put together an Olympic Twitter account and Twitter lists if you prefer your news and social interaction bite-sized. We have an overall Olympics list, and separate lists by sport. You can find those on our PostRank Twitter lists page.

But just like those Olympic athletes we’ll be cheering on, we can’t do it alone. We need your help to make the PostRank Olympic topics the best they can be! There are 15 sports in the Games, and athletes participating from over 80 nations. And let’s not forget the Olympic-related organizations, news coverage, and other commentary that’ll be going on.

There’s a lot of content out there, and while we’re working hard to gather up and organize as much of it as we can, collectively you know way more than we do. If you know of an Olympic athlete, commentator, news site, country’s team, or Olympic-related organization we don’t have in our topics or Twitter lists yet, let us know at olympics@postrank.com and we’ll add it right away. Content from outside North America is especially welcome. (It doesn’t have to be in English; it just needs to have an associated RSS feed.)

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games are gonna be great, and we don’t want you to miss a moment!

2009 was a big year for publishers. Audience engagement with content has once again grown by 30% percent, even as the balance of engagement has changed dramatically. On-site engagement has dropped over 50%, while off-site engagement, now over 80% of most publishers’ total engagement, has skyrocketed!

PostRank gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, like Twitter, Digg, and Delicious over the course of 2009. That data represents the hard work of thousands of bloggers, and is the backbone of our Analytics, Data Services, and content filtering services.

With more competition than ever for audience’s attention, we wanted to award those bloggers whose hard work and great content most engaged and grew their audiences over the past year.

Which brings us to… The Top Blogs of 2009!

We crunched all of the 2 billion metrics from the past year to rank the blogs by their engagement within each topic populated by our users. In total, we selected nearly 500 topics (491 to be precise) containing 15725 total blogs, and built a detailed profile for the performance of each site – their overall rank, their engagement profile over the entire year, and their top posts as determined by their audience.

Awards methodology

Each topic contains a ranked list of blogs, along with each blog’s engagement profile and top posts for all of 2009. However, we didn’t feel that handing out just one award per topic (Most Engagement) told the whole story, so we are highlighting three notable achievements per topic:

• Most Engagement
• Most Influential
• Biggest Movers & Shakers

To determine the winners of Most Engagement, we identified each post that the audience interacted with in 2009 for each site, calculated the total engagement points per post, and then determined the total amount of engagement for each site over the course of the year. From there, it was simply a matter of ranking the blogs by who got the most points overall in each topic.

We’ve awarded bragging rights to each topic’s Most Influential bloggers as well. We determined who they are by calculating who averaged the most engagement per post over the course of the year. Would consistent efforts at engaging the audience win the day, or would a handful of posts gone viral be enough to claim the crown? Find out!

We also wanted to recognized those who worked their butts off this year, and have the audience and influence growth to show for it. Those bloggers who showed the biggest engagement growth over the course of the year have been awarded our Biggest Movers & Shakers award. Will these folks will win the Most Engagement award next year?

We couldn’t have done it without you!

Now, we know this extravaganza is totally v1.0. And a really big example of crowdsourcing. So no, it’s not perfect. There will be some duplication and inconsistency, and I’m sure we’ll hear cries of, “Hey, I’m not included in _____ topic!” (Good thing that’s very easy to rectify!)

It’s inevitable, but if we waited til it was perfect, it’d never happen. And we’re all about making things happen. Plus, realistically, with a few thousand people involved, what is the definition of “perfect”, anyway?

All that said, we’re really jazzed about the results, and hope you’ll find it interesting and useful. We’re also incredibly grateful to our user community for being such a big part of building it. With your continued help, it’s only going to get better for 2010 and beyond!

Bragging rights!

All of our winners can claim badges on their blog pages to announce their triumph, and everyone included in the topics list can grab the badge that displays their rank. Each blogger’s page will also conveniently display their Top 10 posts for 2009, which easily facilitates those “Best Of…” posts. (Readers love getting shortcuts to the good stuff.)

Will your blog be on top in 2010?

Check out the Top Blogs of 2009 and see how your blog stacks up, or just find great new content to read on all the topics you’re interested in!

And, of course, if your blog is not included within the topics, make sure to add it to be included next year!

In fact, the main finding of the study is that Social Computing is already mainstream! Not surprisingly, the trends they discover fall directly in line with data we see at PostRank (Measuring Engagement of Social Web): 30% year over year growth in user engagement for the past 3 years, and a shift towards user curation and strengthening of the weak ties.

Key trends observed by the JRC-IPTS researches:

• 41% of all EU Internet users, and 64% of those aged under 24, were engaged in Social Computing activities
• 38% of people aged 15-25 in Europe had profiles on Social Computing sites
• 32% of European Internet users had crated a Social Networking Site profile
• 30% of internet users make use of Social Computing content created by others, e.g. they read blogs or wiki sites, watch videos on YouTube or use social networking sites
• 10% (included in above 30%) provide feedback or comments
• 3% are content producers, e.g. they create blogs or Wikipedia articles, upload user-generated video onto YouTube or photos onto Flickr

Societal change and Social Computing

A good sign that Social Computing is mainstream is also the fact that older audiences (aged 55 and above – 25% of internet population in Europe) are joining in on the fun.

Collaborative learning models, alternative learning channels (social computing has been shown to have negative impact on TV viewing and reading of newspapers, by substituting online content instead), ability to connect learners to experts and researches to practitioners in field under study are all contributing to profound positive change on our society:

Overall, we expect that Social Computing will foster social change in the next 10-20 years. At the societal level, there could be more efficient, interconnected and transparent markets, more participatory processes of governance and new forms of economic and social innovation.

Read the full report here, and also take a look at the recent trends we identified at PostRank: Measuring Engagement of Social Web.

It’s great to work with such a well-known publisher and see PostRank engagement data used to bolster offline traditional media analysis in such an important way. We think it’s a great example of how traditional media is looking forward and seeing how the social web can be valuable in performing research, expanding reach, and keeping relevant to their audiences.

From the case study, a bit more about Atlantic Wire’s goals and intentions with The Atlantic 50 project:

With the Atlantic 50, The Atlantic Wire intends to be the go-to op-ed page by aggregating the latest opinions from a defined set of opinion makers, found across the web. There is so much opinion out there, in blogs and on mainstream media sites like newspapers’ and magazines’ online properties. The Atlantic 50 is intended to appeal to an educated, media literate audience who read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and similar publications, but simply don’t have time for thorough reading, including the op-ed page, every day.

The Atlantic Wire team has framed current political commentary in two ways, as a result. Readers can browse by topic and see what’s currently “hot” among pundits and their audiences. These are stories on the topics currently getting the most engagement from online information consumers like themselves. From healthcare to the economy, it’s to find out what’s being talked about, and what different folks’ take on the issues are.

Additionally, the opinion makers of The Atlantic 50 are ranked by the amount of engagement their content is currently receiving. The list is updated regularly, so where they fall in the rankings in a result of how their audiences are reading, organizing, sharing, and responding to their commentary, rather than being based on editorial judgment or assessment of political leanings.

Keep your eye on The Atlantic Wire and, whether you lean left, right, or just love great online news and opinion coverage, let us know what you think of The Atlantic 50.

Each year, 20 tech companies, innovating in the fields of clean technologies, information technology and digital media, are selected to showcase their product or service for the CIX community.

On December 2nd, at the Design Exchange in Toronto, each company will deliver a 7-minute presentation about what they’re doing, where they’re headed, and how it’s changing the world. A judging panel of industry experts will evaluate each company’s product and provide constructive feedback and guidance.

The community present at the event will then vote for the winner of the CIX 2009 Award for “Canadian Innovation Leader”. 
(Fingers crossed!)

The PostRank team submitted an application focusing on innovations in web analytics. When asked to describe why our innovation deserves to be one of the CIX Top 20, this is, in part, what we had to say:

Our algorithms are based on actual audience activity, so scoring is not subjective to opinion, and takes into account many more factors that contribute to how content and publishers become influential online.

PostRank’s real-time, content-focused functionality enables people to discover engagement with ALL their content, not just “magic” words. It also enables seeing how the audience is reacting as it happens, facilitating immediate interaction to answer questions, provide additional information, and build relationships.

PostRank is in some pretty illustrious company on the list, and we want to extend extra big congratulations to the other Kitchener-Waterloo companies representing: Aeryon Labs, IGLOO, and Metranome. And also to Overlay.TV, which, along with Metranome and PostRank, are Tech Capital portfolio companies.

The reception has been great, and we’re thrilled about all the sign-ups. We’re also, of course, grateful for all the feedback, questions, and kudos we’ve received, too. Keep ‘em coming!

Now, launching something as big as Analytics is no excuse to rest on our laurels. (Good thing, since laurels are kind of pointy and uncomfortable.) The team has been really busy in the succeeding weeks, fixing bugs, tweaking the UI, and making things work even better.

Like what?

New metrics layout: We’ve changed the Analyze view to better show what engagement is and how it’s calculated. We added “Engagement Events”, which represent the number of distinct audience activities for each story. We’ve more clearly visually tied “Events” to the PostRank score for each story, and introduced average amount of engagement per activity, which is a useful metric to judge the types of activity each post is attracting (e.g. lots of low engagement activities — like views, a few high engagement activities — like comments, etc.)

Updated login UI: A number of folks alerted us to the fact that it was a bit confusing to tell whether you were logged in or logged out from the Analytics site. We’ve changed how things look so it should be pretty obvious now if you’re logged in, and, for those with more than one account, who is logged in.

Google Integration is now industrial strength: We replaced the Google Analytics integration code with a much faster engine. This has improved loading time and performance by leaps and bounds.

Bug fixes: We do our best, but we can’t catch everything… We’ve fixed some things the community has reported, as well as things we noticed when sign-ups started. Some fixes affect the whole system; some are user-specific. This will be an ongoing project, of course.

Improved Daily Engagement Reports: Mostly on the back end, we upgraded how they’re built and sent out, so they should be more reliable now.

Upgraded social profiles: We added more sources to enable you to better connect with your audience (e.g. GitHub and LinkedIn).

Revamped Account page: It was a bit scroll-y before, so we’ve separated out the functions in a sidebar on the left, which should make it easier to navigate to what you want to do.

Even though we’ve made a lot of improvements, PostRank Analytics is by no means a static product at this point. Even as we speak we’re working on some very cool enhancements that we can’t wait to share with you! Stay tuned…

Information vs. Attention Scarcity

Delivering highly personalized, context aware and timely information should be the goal of any publisher and application. There is simply so much information online that it’s impossible to be competitive without those deliverables. The push towards real-time technologies addresses the factor of time, but also places an even higher value on context and relevance. If the breaking story requires immediate attention, should the application interrupt your current task or pull you out of a meeting? Herbert Simon identified this problem decades ago:

Many designers of information systems incorrectly represent their design problems as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excel at providing more and more information to people, when what is really needed are systems that excel at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.

Or, as Clay Shirky put it, “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”

Context, Relevance and Rich Metadata

Context and relevance are subjective and require explicit knowledge about the user. Personalized news, targeted content and recommendations systems can now be found in most applications as they try to help the user navigate the continuously expanding media landscape. Metadata about the user is a scarce and a valuable resource: if the application knows your preferences, it can deliver useful information. But in order to know your preferences, you first have to go through an often painful training phase where it knows often laughably little about you. In machine learning parlance, this is known as the “cold start” problem.

However, user metadata is only one part of the equation. Having a rich description of the content itself can be an enormous help in helping determine the context and relevance to the user. For example: what is the content about, who is the author, how was it classified, how big is the audience? At PostRank, we’re trying to answer all of those questions and more. We leverage the real-time web to guarantee timely delivery, but as each story passes through the PostRank stack, it is also enriched with as much metadata as possible:

• Language Analysis: Each story is run through a machine learning algorithm to determine the language. As it turns out, most publishers either forget to provide this data or have it set incorrectly.
• Semantic Analysis: Each story is a categorized for general sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative), the overall emotional score, and a detailed score for each of Paul Ekman’s categories (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise).
• Real-time Feed Engagement Score: How has this feed performed within the last 30 days? A real-time engagement score is injected into every feed, allowing you to easily gauge the size of the engaged audience.
• Topic & Category: Leveraging the PostRank index and topic classification, each feed is enriched with data about areas of coverage and their popularity.
• And more…

Attention is scarce and as designers of these applications we have to leverage every bit of information available to help the user make the best use of their time and attention. At PostRank our goal is to help the user “Find and Read What Matters”. As the real-time protocols gain wider adoption, we believe that having rich metadata will be crucial to good user experience, and the next evolution in the better, faster dissemination of content and news.

Building or thinking of a Real-Time web application? Come by and talk to us at the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summit this week (October 15th) in Mountain View, or ping us directly at anytime.

The continuous cycle of innovation has only one major down side: there is never a clear technological winner. Take RSS for example. Instead of repeatedly visiting your favorite sites just to discover that there is no new information, RSS inverts the relationship and allows your news reader to deliver the stories to you — a great time savings! However, how does the news reader know to check for new content? Well, it could periodically ask the server (polling), or perhaps the publisher could notify it that new content is available via a ping server. In a few cases, data can be transferred via near real-time protocols such as XMPP or AMQP. Or, if you prefer to stay within the specification of the HTTP protocol, perhaps you could leverage the new and emerging PubSubHubbub and RSSCloud standards.

Seems complicated? It is, and if you are looking to deliver a seamless experience to your users, you have to cover all of the delivery mechanisms to fulfill the promise of the real-time web. This isn’t something you can knock off in a weekend.

Cogs & Wheels of the Real-Time Web

• Polling - the consumer has to periodically check the news feed for content. This is by far the most pervasive method of propagating news and also the most inefficient. The more frequently you check, the more frequently you’ll discover that there is no new content. Plus, resources are used both on the consumer and the producer sides.
• Ping servers – launched in late 2001, ping servers are a mechanism for publishers to notify the world of newly available content. A consumer could then theoretically subscribe to this global stream and listen for notifications of publisher updates. It is a great mechanism but there are a few problems. Ping servers do not guarantee 100% coverage, and if you’ve ever subscribed to the ping stream you will know that most of it is spam. In other words, it’s an accelerator technology and it cannot replace polling.
• XMPP, AMQP and long-lived HTTP connections are standalone protocols built specifically for routing messages in (near) real-time. A few publishers have enabled these channels, but due to their deployment and integration costs the overall adoption is incredibly low.
• PubSubHubbub and RSSCloud are the new emerging standards that are promising to deliver the functionality of publish-subscribe architecture, but within the bounds of the HTTP specification: lower entry barriers, faster adoption rate. Of course, having FeedBurner, TypePad and Wordpress adopt these standards also goes a long way. A good fraction of some of the most popular feeds can now be consumed via these protocols. Having said that, this does require new server and client infrastructure, so don’t expect your local newspaper, blogger, or news reader to have it enabled just now.

Leveraging PostRank’s Real-Time Web platform

Want to build a real-time delivery platform? You have to think about all of the technologies described above, and this is before we even think about the dozens of different publishing standards (RSS, ATOM, etc.), spam filtering, and metadata and language normalization issues. At PostRank, we’ve dedicated the last two years to building just such a platform to power our service.

PubSubHubbub, RSSCloud, XMPP, ping servers, and polling – we’ve got you covered. Whatever the mechanism, we’re always looking to shave off a few extra seconds and get you one step closer to the real-time web. Additionally, all the content is normalized, passed through additional language and sentiment analysis filters, enhanced with additional metadata (feed engagement, topics and tags, etc.) and then streamed to our clients and internal applications via the best-suited protocols (WebHooks, AMQP, RSS, etc).

Building or thinking of a Real-Time web application? Come by and talk to us at the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summit this week (October 15th) in Mountain View, or ping us directly at anytime.

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.

Huzzah!

Here at PostRank the concept of audience engagement is second nature to us, and we’re excited by the fact that one of the world’s largest advertisers understands that the quality of community, not just the quantity, is something that should be measured and rewarded.

It’s no secret that advertising on the web is an inexact science at best, and that pageviews have been the key measure of where advertisers place their bets. It’s also no secret that figuring out how to measure the ROI of social media has become a scorching hot topic with no clear answer.

While we weren’t sure how it would all shake out, two years ago we anticipated the importance of tracking and measuring discrete social engagement activities with online content across the web. It enabled us to figure out which publishers had the most engaging content and actively engaged audiences. Two years later we’ve got the evidence to show that the rise of social hubs as places where strong communities live and grow means that pageviews are only part of the story.

Think about it this way: in the world of sales, pageviews are analagous to the number of people walking through the door. They come in, they have a look around, and if you dazzle them with fancy endcaps or appealing displays, they might spend more money than intended. What you don’t know though, is whether it was a drive-by experience, or one driven by loyalty. And since building loyalty with customers is one of the strongest channels to long-term revenue, why wouldn’t an advertiser want to go to those places where they know loyal communities exist? 

It’s about connecting with the right people who want to hear the message, driving down the cost of each sale and driving up the average dollar value of each transaction.

We think it’s high time that advertisers started to look at audience engagement with online content as a key driver of revenue. By understanding how deeply a publisher is connected with readers and measuring that loyalty through specific engagement activities wherever they happen on the web, advertisers will get more bang for their marketing buck.

Based on what we know so far, the engagement criteria P&G is using is a step in the right direction, and we applaud it. However, engagement involves a vast array of interactions that goes well beyond measuring video views, sign-ups for newsletters, and playing games directly on a publisher’s site.

At PostRank, we know that 80% of a publisher’s engaged audience is commenting, tweeting, bookmarking, recommending, and doing myriad other things with the publisher’s content somewhere else on the web (i.e. not on the publisher’s site). P&G and others like them need to extend their view of how to reach loyal audiences and we challenge them to widen the net to include the kind of engagement analytics that PostRank has built its business around collecting.