Engagement Filtering with PostRank

Aug 05

Chris HornakBlogging, Social Media 2 Comments

I recently discovered something new that has become a core part of my online experience. It’s called PostRank and it helps me filter through my RSS feeds to find the most engaging content and when you’re subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds it really comes in handy.

So What is PostRank?

“PostRank is a scoring system developed by AideRSS to rank any kind of online content, such as RSS feed items, blog posts, articles, or news stories. PostRank is based on social engagement, which refers to how interesting or relevant people have found an item or category to be. Examples of engagement include writing a blog post in response to someone else, bookmarking an article, leaving a comment on a blog, or clicking a link to read a news item.” – How PostRank Works

Scoring Engagement

A few of the ways that PostRank is scoring engagement are; page views within RSS readers, twitter mentions, comments, diggs and about a dozen other sources.  My experiences so far with the PostRank scoring have been very positive. The post with the highest score almost always deserve it and the posts with very low scores are usually less interesting.

Since I work in the SEO industry the first thing that came to mind after seeing PostRank is when are major search engines going to adapt similar technology. Right now most search engine’s rely on link data but what about the other stuff like comments, tweets and social interactions.

You could argue that the reason they don’t include these social metrics in their algorithm is because it would be so easy to game the system, but after using PostRank for a while I think you too will see that grading content on metrics outside of links is possible.

Final Thought

With technologies like PostRank, twitter search, social mention and other social media ranking tools becoming more abundant, search engines will need to setup up their game if they want to keep their market share.

What are your thoughts?

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2 Comments (+add yours?)

  1. Melanie Baker
    Aug 05, 2009 @ 07:43:10

    Hi Chris, thanks for the post. Always cool to meet a new fan!

    Your comment about search engines adding technology like ours made me smile — we have a running joke around the office about buying out Google one day. :)

    Re. trying to game the system, it’s not actually something that comes up much. One could argue, of course, that in this context it’s not really worth it — WAY too much effort for not much of a tangible payoff. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to detect and correct, and balancing algorithms is something we’re always doing anyway, since the social web ecology is constantly changing.

  2. Chris Hornak
    Aug 05, 2009 @ 07:47:51

    Hello Melanie, thanks for the comment.

    “we have a running joke around the office about buying out Google one day” – that’s weird I have that same dream every night… haha j/k.

    It’s good to hear you’re always making adjustments to the algorithim. With so many sources and metrics to look at I bet that’s a though task.

    Keep up the good work!

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