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With New Curve and PostRank, We're Upping the Minimum Points for Entry
Posted
by Charlie Moran
on
06.10.09
@ 04:52 PM
About a month and a half ago, we introduced PostRank into the Power 150, and soon thereafter we switched over to a more nicely-scaled Power 150 that spreads people's point totals out more evenly across the board. Now we're taking advantage of both improvements in order to update our pre-evaluation system.
We've had a 20-point barrier of entry since last fall, and it's made the approval process saner and more manageable. However, with the shuffled weights of the different metrics and the new scales in place, this bar has become less and less meaningful. As of now, there are only a handful of blogs out of more than 1,000 that would not make it in today, whereas, when we first implemented the pre-evaluation, a new blog that passed would have landed at around the 600 mark. So today we're adding PostRank into the pre-evaluation mix and raising the minimum objective point total 50, which will put new blogs around the 720-730 mark when they enter the Power 150.
Introducing Bell Curve Grading
Posted
by Charlie Moran
on
04.29.09
@ 10:29 AM
Most of you probably woke up this morning and, just before checking the Times and your email, raced to see how the Power 150 was looking today. Hopefully none of you spit out your coffee when you saw that things had been shaken up a bit.
Early this morning we implemented a few changes on the back-end that will make computing your scores easier and more reliable for our server. Most of them will be invisible to the outside world, but, in the process, we've shifted to a more consistent, and, we think, fair scaling mechanism, which you may have noticed.
Our New Mega-Metric and How It Will Affect Your Score
Posted
by Charlie Moran
on
04.24.09
@ 10:11 AM
For a while now, we've been trying to find a way to make the Power 150 more dynamic so that that it's more reflective of current trends/influences and more fun to watch on a daily basis. After weeks of effort on the part of ourselves and the fine people at AideRSS, we'd like to announce our best stab at achieving these goals with the arrival of PostRank metrics on the Power 150.
Oh, what's PostRank, you say? Here's a brief explanation: PostRank is a service that measures the active engagement of your blog posts. By tracking sources such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us and Google, activity such as RSS feed subscriptions, comments your posts receive, and good, ol' fashioned, page views, PostRank can measure how well your blog does on a post-by-post basis.
For the Power 150, AideRSS has opened up their API to give us composite engagement scores that sum up blogs as a whole, and we're taking that data and integrating it into our rankings. And we're really going deep this time: PostRank scores will now comprise a full 1/3 (or 50 points) of your Power 150 score.
Why's PostRank so great? For one, unlike other metrics, they provide real-time data. We'll only be grabbing it once a day like any other metric, but you can be reasonably sure that your recent hot post will be accounted for. But here's an even bigger reason: we have a specific time window. For each blog, we're grabbing PostRank scores for only the previous 30 days, an intentionally small window of time. We wanted to make the Power 150 more dynamic and current, and, by basing 1/3 of your overall score on recent activity, we're hoping this will affect rankings in three ways:
- Level the playing field a bit. If you're a king now, you could be demoted within 30 days. If you're at the bottom, you could enter the upper reaches yourself within a month, if you do well enough. Of course, the latter still won't be easy, but hopefully not the insurmountable task it once was, because recent successes will count for more and long-accrued success a little less.
- Encourage people to keep up with their blogs. If you stop blogging for a month (as some of you have -- tsk, tsk), your score will suffer. We don't necessarily want to punish you for taking a break, but we think those who are still active and working should have an advantage.
- Give a better picture of what's happening now. We want the Power 150 to be a more dynamic place, a better reflection of the fluidity of conversations on the web rather than a calcified "Who's Who." It's a pretty lofty goal, but this our best shot so far.
For those concerned about the change, we'd like to point out that 2/3 (100 out of 150 points) of our scales are staying relatively the same. We're ratcheting down the influence of Technorati -- it's going from 60 points total down to a more reasonable 20 -- by halving the worth of Technorati In-Links and In-Blogs (Authority) and eliminating Rank altogether. After going through all of the metrics we have, we decided it was redundant to include both Rank and In-Blogs, since they measure the exact same thing.
To PostRank into our scales, we've also scaled down Yahoo! to 20 points, which also makes it more in line with the relative weights of our other metrics. With this and the Technorati changes, your relative position in all our metrics outside of PostRank should not change much.
While we can't expect everyone to agree the changes we've made, we're hoping that they're what the Power 150 needs to stay relevant and useful for the future. We've got some new features in the works, many of which are now possible thanks to PostRank, and we'll be rolling them out in the weeks and months to come. Please share your thoughts about our changes in the comments, our Facebook group or just drop me an email.
Not Doing So May Negatively Affect Your Blog
Posted
by Rahmin Pavlovic
on
04.09.09
@ 04:53 PM
This has been an ongoing issue -- on and off the Power 150 -- and can have serious ramifications to how your blog is ranked. There seems to be a lot of (mis)information about this online, so let's see if we can settle the score here.
Not Creating a Forwarding Address
If you're switching hosts, or moving your feed to a new service, you are seriously prone to mis-representing your blog (and not just on the Power 150).
Improved Fail-Safes Will Help Prevent Your Blog From Falling Unfairly
Posted
by Rahmin Pavlovic
on
04.08.09
@ 02:05 PM
As of last week, we stabilized two aspects of the Power 150 that caused some blogs to randomly slip in rank.
Ad Age's Blog Index Wins in Creative Use of Online Category
Posted
on
03.24.09
@ 02:23 PM
Ahem ... we'd like to announce that Ad Age's Power 150 won the Society of American Business Writers and Editors' Best in Business award in the Creative Use of Online category. Honors went to Assistant Managing Editor Ken Wheaton; Jr. Web Producer/Editor Charlie Moran and Web Products Manager Rahmin Pavlovic.
We're flattered but clearly indebted to not only Todd Andrlik, who created it, but also the 953 blogs and bloggers who are ranked on the Power 150. We owe much of our success to those of you who are supportive enough to display a badge, talk about it on Twitter, Facebook or your blog, and otherwise spread conversations about it wherever you go. Many of you have also provided feedback and been patient when we've had glitches, and you've helped to make it a better resource for everyone, so thank you.
We've got a couple new things in store that will make the list more useful in the near future, but, in the meantime, we've got some more good news: Yahoo In-Links are now fully functional. We'll be adding them back into the pre-evaluation mix shortly, and, if you're already in, you shouldn't have to worry about getting (or asking for) an accurate score.
Plus: Google Gets Feedburned, Yahoo! Still Burns
Posted
by Rahmin Pavlovic
on
03.09.09
@ 06:10 PM
We're on the Facebook
As you may or may not have noticed, the Power 150 badge got a facelift recently -- and it's not just sexier: it loads faster on your page, leaves a smaller footprint behind and has been widgetized for Facebook support.
Problems With the Yahoo! InLinks API and What We're Doing About It
Posted
by Rahmin Pavlovic
on
01.14.09
@ 02:34 PM
UPDATE: We're now in touch with Yahoo, which is working diligently on the problem. We'll keep you posted as to when we're getting functionality back.
Why, indeed...
As some of you have already noticed, the Yahoo! Site Explorer API hasn't been updating scores for some time now -- we're not exactly sure how long, but it's been a couple weeks.
Power 150 Creates New Entry Requirements, Stiffens Others
Posted
by Charlie Moran
on
10.09.08
@ 06:28 PM
Ever since we introduced the easy-to-use submission form on the Power 150, the amount of daily submissions we've been receiving has exploded. On the one hand, this is great. The submission process is now streamlined and there's less pretension of political jockeying or other nefariousness for people to get themselves in. With more and more blogs now -- we've just about doubled since Ad Age took it over from Todd -- our little list is getting more attention than ever.
However, with all this growth comes some pains. We've also gotten more bogus submissions than ever -- thank you, we're full up on porn and cell phones already! -- and far more genuine submissions than we can get around to adding in a timely manner. So, in the interests of all involved -- including ourselves, of course -- we're putting up a small barrier to entry for new blogs. Why? We'd like to speed up our process of blog additions. By imposing this new limit, blogs that are sufficiently established -- at this point, a new blog that makes it past our barriers will land around the 600 rank, so we don't think we're setting the bar unnecessarily high -- can get listed quicker and we can spend more time improving the service than performing lots of time-intensive vetting.
It Is Your Blog, After All
Posted
by Rahmin Pavlovic
on
08.24.08
@ 06:14 PM
The internet -- being the dynamic place that it is -- is wrought with frequent changes and updates. Websites often find a new home; technology for things like RSS feeds are often updated; names of products often evolve; and search engines are -- despite otherwise being the shining beacons of technology that they are -- often a few steps behind, or may be indexing things in a way you may not expect.
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