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.

You can get the new version of the extension here: http://gr.postrank.com.

We WILL make sure to let everyone know once the upgrade is done and the extension is working with Firefox 3.5.

2) We ARE working on it.

3) I know, you’ve probably heard me say that before. Sorry about that. Trust me, no one wishes it was a quick fix more than we do.

It’s been a combination of things — upgrading the system, then troubleshooting to clean up some small issues that came up, and then a couple other things that have been maddeningly persistent and elusive. (You know how sometimes when things go wrong it’s just one little thing after another? Yeah, it’s like that.)

You may even have noticed that the issues are intermittent with posts showing up in the widget (or not), or posts and metrics showing up (and being updated in a timely manner) on your PostRank page (or not).

Again, we apologize for the instability, and we will get it licked. Unfortunately, at this point I don’t know exactly when things will be working properly. Also, once the system’s functioning right, we’ll have a backlog of new feeds, new posts, and new metrics to analyze, and THEN we’ll be back in tip top shape.

As soon as things are working properly, I’ll make sure everyone knows.

In good news, while the delays are a pain, in the end they stand for good things being afoot. We’re getting through the bulky part of converting to a new feeds system. The end result will be bigger, better, faster (though I am told it still won’t allow really awesome posts to go up to 11 — sorry).

From what we can see at this point, the work hasn’t fully broken anything, just slowed down the functions that grab new posts and their engagement metrics. We’re not missing the data, we just haven’t processed it yet. But we will.

Things should be working properly, and much faster, within a couple of days. Until then, there are only limited things we can do, so mostly we’re really grateful if you could just be patient a bit longer.

Of course, if, once we’re into next week, if things are still looking way behind for you or something else appears to have gone completely pear-shaped, please let us know. (When things are done and working properly, we’ll be in touch.)

• adding new feeds to the system
• gathering/analyzing metrics for new and existing feeds
• display of feeds’ posts and metrics on postrank.com
• updating and display of feeds in Google Reader.

We’ll be working on confirming that reported issues are fixed and getting back to those who reported them via email, Twitter, and Get Satisfaction as soon as we can. (That includes older issues people reported that we couldn’t confirm were fixed while the issue was ongoing.)

The system is also now processing the backlog of new feeds to add to the system, and new posts to update with engagement. That should be caught up within 24 hours.

In the mean time, if you notice any new issues, please let us know on Get Satisfaction by Reporting a problem.

Thanks to those who’ve reported problems, and for your patience while we get caught up.

Technorati gets a lot of flack for the shortcomings of their service, (they did respond to the TechCrunch article). From our perspective, however, Technorati was the best tool for what it measured in its time. But times have changed, and links are but one of many important metrics behind the big picture of publisher/audience engagement now.

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

There is a lot to unpack here. The quote initially covers the juggernaut of information sources online — blogs being only one. Combating this was the catalyst behind the founding of AideRSS.

Too many blogs, too many posts, not enough time. Just tell me what I need to know. And that is the problem we’ve addressed with the filtering and customization functionality on our website, with our Firefox and Google Reader extensions, and with our widget.

The quote goes on to comment on the evolution and proliferation of social networking sites and tools, the development of which are inextricably linked to the proliferation of blogs and pretty much every other kind of information online. Not only are people using these sites and tools to publish, they’re using them to respond and share.

A service that only measures links ignores all of this communication and sharing. We don’t.

We continually work on adding more metrics sources to our PostRank analysis to get not only a good cross-section of social site types, but also geographies. As much as it sometimes seems that the Web has become completely global and homogenous, influential social, sharing, and microblogging sites in North America might not have the same reach in Brazil, or Russia, or Japan.

As the article also notes, these sites not only speed up our ability to communicate – to blog and share interesting information or find resources – it has also sped up and expanded our ability to respond to others’ content.

Now, we have the ability to instantly interact with, respond, or promote blog content away from the source blog, but that shouldn’t make the original post any less valuable. In fact, while blog authority isn’t capitalizing on these new sources for linkbacks, link authority is still affected, no matter the source, and helps increase the visibility and weight of the host blog in search engines.

The immediacy of publishing, sparking dialog, and receiving responses only reinforces this behavior. And, it encourages participation without having to write a blog post tracking back to the originator of each discussion. So, posts are missing out on a trove of valuable linklove from other blogs that would otherwise have contributed to their authority.

Finding out how who’s been linking to you, or how many links your content has generated over the past few months is nice, but only as a retroactive measurement. Potential advertisers may care how “popular” you were last month. Your audience/customers? Less likely. Relying on link-based metrics causes publishers to miss out on a trove, alright, but a trove of information and interaction a whole lot more valuable than linklove.

Nowadays, by the time your Google or TweetBeep alert arrives, the opportunity to answer questions, respond to criticism, or otherwise participate in conversations with your audience may already have passed.

Because of the importance of keeping up with the velocity of audience engagement, we’ve focused a lot of work on making our services real-time. PostRank metrics show you where and how people are engaging with your content immediately, which is great for customer service, information sharing, and really interesting conversations.

And real-time engagement metrics are only the first step in using what we’ve learned and the data we’ve gathered to help publishers make sense and make use of when, where, and how their audiences are engaging with their content. We’ve got bigger plans.

We think publishers’ authority should come from their entire audience, not just those who happen to publish and maintain blogs.

In closing, the TechCrunch article notes:

But forget about blogs. This discussion begets a bigger question. Will we need a separate Technorati-type index for measuring the authority of content publishers on Twitter and other micro-media in their own right? Of course we do.

We couldn’t agree more, though I’m not sure segregating authority by service (e.g. “Twitter authority”) is quite the answer. We don’t need more fragmentation in trying to manage our information and relationships.

What the Web still lacks, to a large degree, is cohesiveness. A holistic resource that shares who people are, what they do, what they know, and how influential they are. And that influence (aka authority) should be judged by those who publishers make efforts to reach — their audience — regardless of where that audience chooses to live and work online.

To that end, we’ve got some really interesting plans. We hope you’ll find them interesting (and, more importantly, useful) as well. Stay tuned.

If you notice any lingering quirks, please let us know.

Not that the functionality was there but unresponsive; that the functionality wasn’t showing up at all. (Definitely a problem.)

We’re currently looking into the issue, and suspect a code change on Google’s end. As soon as things are debugged, we’ll let everyone know that the Google Reader Extension should be back in business.

This means we will be briefly suspending serving up web pages and API requests so we can update our database to be way more awesome. (That’s not exactly the technical explanation…)

The website, extensions, widget, and API-enabled functionality will briefly stop working at 11am tomorrow (Feb. 19th). We’re planning for the maintenance to only take about 10 minutes. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

After about noon (12pm EST), if you see any erratic behavior on our website or with the extensions, widget, or API-enabled functionality, please let us know so we can fix it ASAP!

We appreciate your patience.