The Inquisitr » ranking

Another brilliantly stupid idea of Twitter Lists – Country Lists

Steven Hodson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:04:27 +0000

It has only be a few days since the roll out of the Twitter Lists and while most of the social media mavens are getting woodies over how great this is all going to be we are seeing new ideas being thought of each day, hour, minute that will only go to show just how badly this potentially great idea is going to get abused left right and center.

The current top idea that has come to light today is the idea being brought to you by a social media consultancy called Simplyzesty. It started yesterday with them creating a hand curated list of Twitterers who live in Ireland, and now today the word is that they are starting with lists for the US and UK.

The thing is with these lists is that they will be using some sort of automated system to create these two lists. Automated huh, well we all know that means that just as with any other scripts that can be run this stand the chance of being hijacked in some form or another.

According to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch (Europe) the process for getting on these lists will be as follows:

“Here’s how you get yourself into the list. The Irish one was built by hand, but the others are going to be built with a script but (sic) Twitter users tweeting “I want to get listed #TwitterCalifonia [or another state]” and Simplyzesty will collect all the tweets and add them to the lists for each State. In the UK Twitter users can tweet #TwitterEssex, replacing the county name with the county you live in.”

While Butcher notes that this won’t be a comprehensive list of sat Twitterers in Washington State or in London England I would be willing to bet that it will be full of spammer Twitter accounts. There is no mention in anything I have read about this automation of creating Country specific list as to whether there will be any oversight as to who actually gets on those lists.

Even the guys at The Next Web are having a hard time seeing any real value to the whole idea.

While it’s certainly interesting to see what everyone in a particular area is talking about, this isn’t the way to do it. All the company will have produced is a list of the people who are attention-seeking enough to want to be on it. What about all the other people out there in your state or county who aren’t on the list? Don’t they have something interesting to say?

On the surface, as with much of Web 2.0 and social media the warm and fuzzy of the goodness of man will win out, ideas like these are bound to become a way for spammers and less than ethical marketers to get their names on as many lists as possible thereby diluting the value of the original concept.

Call me pessimistic if you want but I tend to look at stuff like this with a healthy dose of realism and an understanding of how human nature isn’t always as pure in its motives as we might like to think.

Just how much mojo do you have with Twitter

Steven Hodson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:25:00 +0000

In contrast to the typically plain and boring Twitter ranking sites where you can go and find out how much juice you have in the Twittersphere a new entry from Yahoo is a well done and dare I say entertaining way to find out where you stand on Twitter.

The Know Your Mojo site uses humor along with a great looking site that once you enter in your Twitter username goes off travelling through their “scientific pipe thingy” to arrive at your Mojo level.

Of course being a sucker for this kind of thing I provided my Twitter username and let the Mojo machine do its thing to find out I am a:

hat tip to Martin Bryant over at TheNextWeb

Technorati, the little service that couldn’t

Steven Hodson — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:37:49 +0000

At one time regardless of the number of new bloggers that poop-up up a daily basis one of the first ting we all did was to sign up for a Technorati account. This was the best way at the time to see how well our blog(s) where doing against the rest of ht blogosphere. It was out of the Technorati listings that we first got use to the term of a-Listers as well has our own ranking based on the number of discovered links that linked back to our posts..

Over the years though as the service tried to find new ways to make relevant to bloggers of all types that have showily moved further and further away from their core business – being an valuable ranking system an blog discovery system for other bloggers. Unfortunately even with their new leadership this divergence for the core business has progressed even further; with the individual becoming secondary to mainstream media being the driving force for a service barely limping.

In fact if you look at the numbers that have been collected by Dean Takahashi from the VentureBeat Blog it is easy to see that rather than the individual blogger; or the small blog networks it is all about mainstream publication taking over the ranking systems. In his breakdown Dean provides the numbers for the last 30 days – as well as the gainers and losers.

New to the top 50
The Dallas Morning News
San Jose Mercury News
Star Tribune

Out of the top 50
US News & World Report
Rolling Stone
Christian Science Monitor
International Herald Tribune (now part of nytimes.com)

Five biggest gainers in rank
PBS
The Houston Chronicle
Google News
NY Post
Slate

Five biggest losses in rank
The Economist
Chicago Tribune
The White House
Financial Times
Newsweek

Five biggest gainers in attention
YouTube
The Wall Street Journal
CNN
LA Times
Wired

Five biggest losses in attention
Reuters
Telegraph.co.uk
The Boston Globe
Financial Times
The Economist

Overall Rankings and Attention
1.   YouTube 60,644
2.   The New York Times 17,374
3.   guardian.co.uk 8,039
4.   The Wall Street Journal 7,513
5.   The Washington Post 6,891
6.   CNN 6,330
7.   Telegraph.co.uk 5,380
8.   Yahoo! News 5,070
9.   MSNBC 5,036
10. The Los Angeles Times 4,536
11. Reuters 4,314
12. FOX News 4,001
13. The Boston Globe 3,838
14. USA Today 3,619
15. Daily Mail 3,530
16. Time 3,524
17. BBC News 3,399
18. NPR 3,189
19. NY Daily News 2,588
20. Forbes 2,534
21. San Francisco Chronicle 2,420
22. Slate 2,187
23. CBS News 2,156
24. Google News 2,093
25. Wired 2,062
26. Financial Times 2,056
27. PBS 2,053
28. NY Post 2,025
29. San Francisco Examiner 1,968
30. BusinessWeek 1,949
31. The White House 1,929
32. Salon 1,928
33. Chicago Tribune 1,924
34. Newsweek 1,880
35. CNNMoney 1,712
36. CBC 1,696
37. Yahoo! Finance 1,642
38. The Economist 1,565
39. New York Magazine 1,550
40. philly.com 1,288
41. The Houston Chronicle 1,120
42. Science Daily 1,093
43. MarketWatch 1,076
44. People 1,066
45. Miami Herald 1,049
46. The Seattle Times 1,049
47. Yahoo! Sports 1,047
48. The Dallas Morning News 939
49. San Jose Mercury News 879
50. Star Tribune 877

These are the top mover and shakers of the Technorati service, and where even a really a year a go you could still find some of the big name tech bloggers it would seem that those day’s are long gone.

Making a joke of Social Media

Steven Hodson — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:10:48 +0000

I’ve been working on another idea and as a result I’ve been doing some thinking about this whole Social Media thing that has gotten a whole bunch of folks wet and warm. My thoughts have been exacerbated as well over this idea that there is some kind of authority ranking associated with people using social media services and tools like Twitter. Hell we wasted a whole weekend blathering on about it both in blogs and on Twitter itself.

The more I thought about the whole discussion about search on Twitter based on some perceived authority the more I have become convinced that there is no such thing as authority in Social Media. In fact I would go as far as saying that by suggesting that there is does nothing more than make a mockery of what Social Media is suppose to stand for. I even went as far as posting this on Twitter itself – which garnered me exactly two replies (excuse the spelling error – I’m in bad need of a new keyboard).

Chris Baskin however put it quite nicely in a post today about this

While there’s no doubt that Twitter users are eager for better search tools (how else will we know what perfect strangers had for lunch?), I rather suspect the attempt to quantify the idea of “authority” as a metric will prove slippery. And here’s why:

In social media, there is no authority.

Not authority as it is being discussed. Because in social media, authority doesn’t extend from its participants. Authority is vested in information and its relevance to users.

This idea that the participants have no vested authority based solely on number of followers; or even the newest suggestion of re-tweets, was clearly made by Douglas Karr the other day – especially in reference to the new Twitter search engines that are using this idea of authority by followers

These sorting engines for Twitter lack both. When I tweeted about Valkyrie a couple of days ago, I would have popped up in the results with my 3,200 followers. Chris Pirillo’s Tweet on Valkyrie is #1 in the results today – because of his 24,000 followers:

[..]

I love Chris Pirillo, but he doesn’t have a lick of authority (sorry Chris!) in reviewing Valkyrie.

Even they only have 1,872 followers, it’s probably a lot more accurate to state that NY Times Movies Twitter, from the NY Times Movies page, has far more authority than me, Chris or anyone else in the results. And the NY Times Twitter account has a fraction of the followers.

The same could be said about my message posted on Twitter about this. If some-one like Robert Scoble or Hugh Macleod had posted the same thing you can bet your ass that they would have gotten more replies; or the new Twitter currency re-tweets, than what I got. Does this mean that they have more authority on whether we are making a joke of Social Media or not? Does it mean that the idea has more value than when I expressed it?

No it just means they have more people plugged into them and in my opinion numbers of people plugged in doesn’t change the inherent value of what is being expressed. It just means that more people will read it and comment on it.

Does this mean that rankings or authority is wrong in Social Media?

No it doesn’t as long as it is the content that is being ranked or given authority – not the person providing the content. Any other form of ranking based on authority only ends up making a joke out of Social Media and when that happens we all will lose out.

Google Opens Up About Ranking Process

JR — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:05:12 +0000

Google is giving the public a little bit of insight into its rarely discussed ranking system.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal posted a detailed blog discussing some common questions about the mysterious process, such as whether Google ever manually edits results:

“Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”

Singhal doesn’t go into any explanation of the technologies or the algorithms driving the ranking. He does say, however, that those topics will come up in a future posting.