Technorati Taking a Leave of Absence From Power 150

One of Our Original Metrics Disappears; Bloglines Bites Bullet as Well

Posted by Charlie Moran on 10.23.09 @ 11:08 AM

Some of you may have noticed lately that Technorati has undergone a redesign, and they've changed the way they calculate Authority. Like we do with PostRank -- ahem -- they now focus on the past 30 days' worth of activity when counting links. It's a good move, and we like their idea for a new Topical Authority measure. The bad news is that they're cutting off their existing API this weekend.

So, as of today, Technorati will be lifted from the Power 150. We're entirely open to bringing it back if and when they put their new API online, but, for now, that's the breaks, unfortunately.

While we're at it, we're deleting Bloglines, a move that's been a long time coming. With the advent of Google Reader, the service's popularity and relevance has plummeted, so now seems like a good time to say goodbye to it as well. PostRank takes RSS activity into account, but removing Bloglines means that we no longer have a metric dedicated to feed readership, which is unfortunate. But we're not aware of any available, credible options to replace it. (We're looking at you, Google Reader. Where's the API?)

This change means that we need to adjust the mix of metrics to keep everything out of 150 points. As of today, Yahoo In-Links will jump from 20 to 30 points, Alexa will jump from 15 to 25, and Collective Intellect will jump from 20 to 30 points. Because of a technical issue with the way we grab Collective Intellect scores, that metric will no longer be included in our pre-evaluations when you submit a new blog. To make up for that, the pre-evaluation will now require just 40 points, and it will be computed from from PostRank, Yahoo and Alexa scores.

For those who've been around since the beginning, this is something of a watershed, as Todd Scores will now be the only metric we have that has been around since the beginning. A lot can happen in a couple years. However, we're still keeping our eyes open for new ways to chart the blogosphere, and please email me if you know of something we've overlooked or you have any questions about the changes we're putting in today.

4 Comments

By lpapworth | Bondi October 23, 2009 10:10:15 pm:

Google owns Feedburner and that has an API
http://code.google.com/apis/feedburner/

Not sure if you have to have a Feedburner feed or whether it's anything RSS feed that Google reads? I pump both my blog feeds and my iTunes podcast feeds through Google's Feedburner and it is a little clunky but at least it lets me measure RSS.

from the person who knows least in the world about APIs and feeds,
Laurel Papworth aka @SilkCharm

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By Robin | London October 24, 2009 09:54:13 am:

Has there also been a change to the way you calculate the PostRank score? It seems like everyone's scores are all over the place...

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By AndyBeard | Ostrow Wlkp, KE October 24, 2009 08:35:42 pm:

PostRank does seem to be a bit "finger in the air"

Could I also make a suggestion? Add some caching of results and ignore wild changes.

This is especially important with Yahoo who sometimes report freaky results at off times, and you end up with numbers that just don't add up e.g. # links for Problogger and Copyblogger to name just 2.

The problem with Google Reader stats is that for WordPress blogs they often have multiple feeds that they don't necessarily know are identical.

For me they can have:-
http://andybeard.eu/feed
http://andybeard.eu/feed/ (note the trailing slash)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites

This is all to do with how they are added to Google Reader, either through an add button, or from a browser's feed icon in the nav bar which adds the redirected feed.

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By charliefmoran | New York, NY October 26, 2009 01:35:49 pm:

Thanks for the thoughtful ideas, all.

Laurel (and others who've asked this question): I wrote a bit about the feedburner problem on our faq (http://adage.com/power150/faq#why-not-feedburner). As far as we're aware, it's still not a viable option for all 1,000+ people on the list. I'd love to be disproven in my reservations about it, though.

Robin: We made a slight tweak to the curve we apply to everyone's scores, which would be most notable for people near the middle; it was a bit bunched up there.

Andy: We do, in fact cache scores when we get nothing back. So if Yahoo forgets who you are tomorrow, we'll ignore it. We don't have any kind of mechanism for scores when they drop or spike precipitously (but are still returning results), however. Since we can't really audit 3rd party sites' data for accuracy, we take them as they come. And PostRank has some degree of volatility baked into our implementation/calculation of it, so to some degree, it's intentional.

And for Google Reader, that's really a problem that affects every metric out there to some degree -- especially when people change their URLs. Some, however, have better systems than others for handling this. We've had a number of discussions with the good folks at AideRSS who run PostRank, and we think they've done a pretty good job of solving these issues. I'd love to just get the google reader API first, though! Then we can encourage people to provide a single feed URL that's auto-discoverable, etc.

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