Comments on: blogdex social network explorer

blogdex social network explorer

otherchaz — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 00:15:51 -0800

blogdex social network explorer via Hack the Planet. Who links to you?

By: ceiriog

ceiriog — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 03:09:47 -0800

Only the people of best quality. It's a nice idea. I'd like to know how the 'blogdex recommends' bit is worked out.

By: jennak

jennak — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 05:34:33 -0800

And I'd like to know how the "friends" part works....how do they differentiate between just regular old linkage and pal linkage?

By: briank

briank — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 05:50:36 -0800

From what I can see, it only works with other sites that are crawled by Blogdex, as it made no mention of the sites that do link to me but aren't registered with Blogdex. It is a spiffin' idea, though.

By: gleuschk

gleuschk — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 06:00:56 -0800

I posted this to MetaTalk last week, then someone said Cameron wasn't ready for mass usage yet, so I asked for the thread to die. It is a groovy gadget - I've been using it all the time. The recommendations are based on how many links you have in common with that person: if only A and B link to something, then their bond is 1/2. If A, B, and C link to it, their bond is 1/3. It's a measure of how much you like the same things, but counts stuff that everybody links to less. The "friends" part, I think, just counts every link on your front page the same, and says A and B are friends if they link to each other's front pages.

By: grabbingsand

grabbingsand — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 07:10:22 -0800

i registered with blogdex months ago. i have yet to be crawled. therefore, i have no links to or fro. is somebody waiting on a check to clear?

By: dhartung

dhartung — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 08:17:20 -0800

To be fair, this is all a big experiment. Mail them again, sandy. I was mainly curious about the 'blogdex recommends' section. Would these be weblogs like my own, or resembling my favorites? Well, I checked out those that I didn't already frequent who were 'recommended' to my visitors, and wasn't impressed with the correlation. I'd be curious what sort of process or algorithm is used to choose them. Does it just need more data?

By: cameron

cameron — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 08:40:11 -0800

apologies, apologies. blogdex was spammed with around 10000 sites a day for a while, and it took us a few weeks to correct the problem. I'm currently sick at the thought of picking through them by hand, so I might just delete them all and start afresh. the recommendations are based on links, so the more you link, the better the statistics should be. the algorithm is a simple collaborative filtering system, similar to what you would find on cdnow or amazon. I'm not particularly proud of it, but I wanted to have some source of entropy in the system so that people might be pulled off the beaten path. I've been writing a paper about the weblog social network, and have come up with quite a few new measures which might be finding their way into the explorer. the most exciting is a method for determining the strength of a connection based on whether or not memes tend to spread along it. If implemented correctly, you should be able to see how and where information flows (and who really influences who!)

By: briank

briank — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 08:52:54 -0800

If you do that (that is, trash them all and start over), would you be sure to mention it in some prominent blogging places so that people who are being crawled can re-up?

By: zeb vance

zeb vance — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 08:53:29 -0800

Bloated head masturbatory nonsense.

What a surprise that Metafilter posters are paying attention.

If you want to do a weblog, do it because you are posting stuff that you believe in, not because some webloggers have massive egos that will check this stuff every five minutes.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 17 Dec 2001 09:56:07 -0800

Bloated head masturbatory nonsense. How so, Zeb? It doesn't rank you on any metric or say anything about who is "better" than anyone else. There are no lists that put anyone above anyone else. It just tracks who you link to, who links back, and what other blogs may be similar. What part of that is masturbatory nonsense? I could see that being true if it gave you a big number of your "blog rank" or some such nonsense, but it doesn't. It's harmless, and the things it attempts to do are new and novel. No one has tried it before, and I'm glad cameron is out there trying new things.

By: Mars Saxman

Mars Saxman — Tue, 18 Dec 2001 09:27:13 -0800

I think it's neat. Someone who finds enough interesting stuff on my site to think it's worth a link is probably going to have stuff on their site that I will be interested in. The tool gives a glimpse of your audience. If you want to do a weblog, do it because you are posting stuff that you believe in Oh, believe me, if I were doing it for kudos I'd have given up years ago. Nobody gives a damn about my website except me, as far as I know, but I keep posting articles and people keep visiting. -Mars