Great posts from around the web
So, a while back I wrote about some upcoming changes / surprises on the blog. The first was a facelift to the blog, which I rolled out a week or so ago. Yesterday, I flipped the switch on the second addition: a list of great posts from around the web on our topics of Leadership and Entrepreneurship. You will have to click through to the actual blog if you are reading this in an E-mail or via RSS. Once here, you’ll see a widget to the right with a heading of “Great Posts from Around the Web”.
I’m using a service called Postrank. In their own words:
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.
PostRank measures engagement by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience’s interaction with online content. An item’s PostRank score represents how interesting and relevant people have found it to be. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.
PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.
In plain English, the service takes the feeds you group together, ranks them based on an internal algorithm related to social popularity, and gives you some options on what to do with the results. For example, you can tag a group of feed, say with the tag Leadership, and Postrank will create a “channel” based on that tag. That is basically how I created the feed that fuels the Great Posts, Leadership tab.
Once you’ve got your channels created, you can tweak them a bit around two dimensions. First, you can select what level of posts you want included in your channel: All, Good, Great or Best. I have selected “Great” for both the Leadership and Entrepreneurship channels. Second, you can include word filter in your feeds if you are looking for very particular content. I did not do that for either feed.
How to use these links
Postrank automatically updates the channel content based on the changing popularity of the individual items in the feeds. So new, popular blog posts will show up automatically alongside old blog posts that may have become suddenly more widely read and bookmarked. The end result is a constantly changing mix of what should be very relevant blog posts for each topic. I invite you to browse through the list when you stop by, and click through the titles that look interesting to you. It’s one more way to bring you interesting, relevant, hopefully valuable content.
I have seeded each channel with the blogs I personally felt offered the best content. If you have a favorite blog or news feed in either channel, please comment or send me a message and I will review it for possible addition to the channel. I’ve played around with Postrank quite a bit and not all feeds make good additions to your channel. For example, I originally had the Venture Beat blog in the Entrepreneurship channel. Venture Beat is a great blog to read to stay on top of VC doings in the technology space. Two problems – it’s too popular and it’s strictly technology focused. Since it was so popular it’s posts were overwhelming the channel.
I would also say that the feeds I used to build the Entrepreneurship channel are fairly broad, just like the concept of Entrepeneurship is, so expect the content to cover a lot of ground. If at first you don’t see much you like, be sure to check back now and again. I’ve been watching the results for a few weeks now and I’ve really liked the mix of content.
So that’s my surprise #2. What do you think?
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Comments
Hi Melanie,
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve played around with PostRank and AideRss for a while now and it was a perfect fit for what I wanted to do here.
I still am not completely sure how it all works, but it works, and I guess that’s all I need to worry about.
If you’re open to suggestions, I’d take a look at how extremely well trafficked sites mix in with other, less trafficked sites. There were some blogs I wanted to include in my list that I had to take out simply because their posts overwhelmed the feed.
Other than than – keep up the good work!
Hi Dave,
This is very cool to see. I love seeing how folks mash up and tweak our functionality to showcase their best stuff and make it even more valuable and accessible to their readers.
Definitely an addition to my real world “So how do people use this stuff?” examples list. Thanks!