PostRank™

Problogger recently came out with a list of 40 Bloggers to Watch in 2011. Being big data geeks, we love lists like this, because they’re easy for us to dig into and find interesting patterns.

Now, we’d have watch these sites’ engagement over time to see how they evolve over the year, but even at first glance there’s some interesting info to be gleaned from the list.

Among the types of blogs, we categorized the highest percentage (37.5%) as personal development — being a better you, living a better life, running a business you love — all that good stuff. The next most prevalent topic covered is entrepreneurship (25%). (Note: these are categorizations I applied after looking over each site and its content.) Some of the other topics are photography, the art of manliness, working through disabilities, and sustainability. Intrigued yet? There’s certainly something for everyone in the list.

This year’s crop of 40 bloggers is quite a different cohort from 2010′s 30 Bloggers to Watch, which were more blogging and business-centric. Those folks also tended to already be more established to begin with (Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse weren’t exactly freshman upstarts even a year ago). So, seeing what the 2011 group gets up to should prove really interesting.

Even better, 38 of this year’s 40 bloggers are also on Twitter, so they’re even more accessible to interact with (though only one blogger didn’t have a visible email address or contact form).

Now, not all these bloggers are at the same point in the evolution of their blogs (or businesses), and, as we’ve already seen, not all of them write on the same topics. So making engagement comparisons isn’t entirely scientific, and they’re not really in competition with each other. In fact, many of them collaborate, guest post, etc., which could prove to help increase audience and engagement even more than just the individual bloggers’ efforts will.

However, for now we can still see who’s getting the most engagement at the moment, based on a recent baseline measurement of engagement. For those new to our analysis, engagement refers to how the audience shows interest in online content on social sites. So when a blog post is published, people read it, and, if it interests them, they might comment, tweet the link, digg it, etc. All of these are engagement activities.

Now, not all engagement activities are created equal. Some represent more interest and effort than others. For example, leaving a thoughtful and interesting comment takes more effort (and indicates greater engagement) than just clicking a button to vote. So we weight each activity and give each a corresponding number of engagement points, which we tally up to give each blog post an engagement score.

Each day we also tally up the blog’s total engagement points, so the points for all engagement activities for all published posts, for a daily engagement score. (The numbers in parentheses in the list below are one day’s total engagement score for each blog.)

For more information in what engagement is and how it works, have a look here and here.)

So, with all that said, the Top 10 among the 40 right now are…

1. Nathalie Lussier: Nathalie Lussier Media (1180)
2. Brett McKay: The Art of Manliness (620)
3. Pat Flynn: Smart Passive Income (604)
4. Catherine Caine: Cash and Joy (568)
5. Daniel Scocco: Daily Blog Tips (502)
6. Tyler Tervooren: Advanced Riskology (319)
7. Srinivas Rao: The Skool of Life (230)
8. Willie Hewes: Mad Science (230)
9. Wil Wheaton: WWdN: In Exile (214)
10. Jess Van Den: Epheriell Designs (201)

I definitely think you need to take a look at all of the bloggers, however, since they have such wonderfully divergent voices, approaches, and ways they can potentially connect with you.

And who knows, maybe they can help you become a 2012 Blogger to Watch.

I’ve recently noticed this post making the rounds, but given that it’s a year old, a few things have definitely changed.

I wanted to update so people wouldn’t be confused upon taking a look at the Power 150 list and at PostRank Analytics.

The first difference relates to the mention of being taken to a PostRank Analytics preview of that site’s social engagement metrics, which is no longer the case.

That PostRank score link used to take you to what we called the Analytics Tour page for that blog. Unfortunately, running the Tour pages caused some issues, so to make things more stable, and still show you interesting metrics, the link now points to the blog’s page on postrank.com.

Each of these pages shows the blog’s recent posts, accompanied by a PostRank score from 1.0 to 10. If you mouse over that score, you can see the breakdown of social engagement metrics that make it up.

Each metric is assigned a weight and points value depending on how much interest or effort it represents on the part of the audience member (e.g. leaving a comment takes more effort than clicking a button to vote). Then we tally up those points to come up with an overall engagement score, which is then represented on the 1.0 to 10 scale. You can read more about engagement and our sources here and here.

So while you’re not getting a peek directly into PostRank Analytics from the Power 150 list, you are seeing some of the same metrics (just much less in-depth). And, as always, to get peek under the hood, you can try Analytics free for 30 days (two months if you use the “Power150″ coupon code) or when you sign up to our PostRank Connect service, you get an Analytics account for free.

The Ad Age Power 150 list is the one to watch for old school bloggers and up-and-comers alike. We still get questions from time to time about what the PostRank scores mean, and how to improve them (hint: PostRank Analytics provides a lot of information about that…)

And yes, the rankings do change over time.

One of the core insights behind the PostRank methodology is that the Social Web enables many different forms of audience interaction with online content: sharing links with friends on social networks, participating in online discussions, bookmarking links for later, and so on. To capture this, we introduced our framework of 5C’s: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting and clicking.

Intuitively, it is also the case that certain types of interactions take more effort on behalf of the user and account for higher amounts engagement. Hence, when calculating the engagement score for an article, the PostRank algorithm takes these variables into account to produce a weighted score based on the amount and types of engagement.

Introducing the Actor

However, we also intuitively understand that not every tweet or comment carries the same weight. A retweet from Tim O’Reilly about your latest tech article is arguably worth a lot more than the same retweet from your friend with a much smaller following. In other words, knowing who the individual is that is performing the action carries a lot of useful information – information that PostRank, ideally, would take into account.

Well, the good news is, we are! Earlier this week we rolled out an update to our Metrics API which is now capable of answering exactly this question. Instead of simply returning the absolute count of events (delicious bookmarks, for example), it will also return a “scaled” value, which is computed based on each individual profile of the user performing the action. Check out our API docs for the detailed instructions and examples.

Under the Hood

It was a tiny change to our API, but one which required an immense amount of engineering and work on the part of our team. How do we weight the event based on the profile? Well, first, we had to build a system that is capable of constructing a historical activity profile for each active user across all of the networks we track.

Then we build a statistical model for each network, with dozens of attributes, which measures the user’s influence on that specific network. Finally, when a new activity comes in from a specific user, we look up their profile, compare them to our model, and adjust the engagement score accordingly. In practical terms, a vote from a Reddit power user will now account for much more engagement than a similar activity from someone who just joined the network — as it should be!

Getting Started with the new API

Best of all, this complicated data heavy lifting requires no work on your part. Simply query our Metrics API and we will take care of the rest. Or, if you’re using our PostRank API, then you are already enjoying the benefits of our new update — more accurate engagement ranking, improved relevancy.

As of earlier this week, we enabled this new weighted mode on the Metrics API for a subset of our engagement sources: Reddit, Delicious, and Hacker News. Over the course of the next several months, we will incrementally roll out the support for all of the remaining networks, as well as add this mode to all of our remaining APIs.

A seemingly tiny change to our API, but a giant step forward when it comes to measuring the engagement of the Social Web, and a great way to kick off 2011!

2010 has been a blast at PostRank. Looking back, it is amazing how much we’ve learned as a company, the new services we have been able to rollout or improve, and the great partners’ and clients we’ve had an opportunity to work with over the course of the year. Of course, all the credit goes to our awesome team which managed to pull it all off – you guys rock.

But, you’re wondering, what exactly is PostRank? Well, as part of our 2010 retrospective, we put together a PostRank in Numbers infographic! Let’s take a look…

PostRank Under the Hood

Tens of gigabytes of new data to process and index each day, an internal processing pipeline which crunches through thousands of jobs each second, and a sustained rate of over 500 API requests every second to power our partners applications and our own! All of that, with a team of 14 people (8 engineers), and of course, a lot of coffee – fun times.

Curious to learn more about our technology stack or capabilities? Check out our Data Services, Analytics, Connect, Labs & open source projects, or read up on our use of AMQP, Solr, Chronos (our job scheduling system), or Goliath (our evented Ruby API framework).

2011, here we come!

When we launched the Google Chrome extension in early August we had no idea how many downloads we might get. Part of the reason was that as a company, PostRank has evolved from our early roots as a free service managing online information overload (Read What Matters!), to an analytics company offering a variety of unique data and other services to our customers. The Chrome Plugin was a natural for us though, and the adoption and popularity of Chrome made it a no-brainer in terms of devoting some resource to it.

Ranking by Engagement

With the end of our year approaching, and measuring all that we’ve accomplished in 2010, it came as a very pleasant surprise to learn that we now have more than 18,000 active daily users of the extension! Not only that, but these are some dedicated Google Reader users as well: just yesterday they’ve generated over 700,000 API requests to our servers!

This is the most useful thing to ever come to Google Reader. i was always discouraged to reading feeds because there were too many. Now I know which articles to not waste my time on. - Chris Ha

This extension gives me the link popularity analysis unavailable anywhere else. - Badley

Love it! This helps to focus on things that are considered to be important. Prevents information-overflow. - Paul Bergmann

It warms our heart to know that the original PostRank insight – using social engagement as a way to find and filter what really matters to you – still has relevance in your day-to-day workflow. In fact, hearing that “It’s the most useful thing ever to come to Google Reader” made us smile.

Fighting with an overloaded RSS reader? Head on over to our Labs page for the extension and follow the instructions – consider it an early Christmas present!