PubSub top 1000, Part 2

Bob Wyman has posted a follow up to my post on PubSub's 1000. I've now figured out the analysis I want to do on the data, but will have to hold off as I am about to go on vacation. Putting that aside, I've been thinking about the middle ranks. As Bob points out, the middle ranks fluctuate in terms of linkRank. I hypothesize that there is some subset of all sites for which a given site has a stable linkRank. This set is effectively the community that the ranked site is a member of. In other words, by having linkRank run agnostically over all sites, the upper, stable sites act whimsically on the linkRank of the lower sites, making them appear unstable when in fact from the community point of view they have a very stable rank.

Think of it this way. If you are a middle rank blogger with a solid community blogging on a specific topic, your in links will be relatively stable - coming from peers in the community. And then one day you blog about something that catches the eye of an A-list blogger. This causes your link rank to fluctuate wildly until the popular topic that you posted on goes beyond the attention span of the blogosphere.  There are two important ideas here:

• We need blogospheres plural, not a single blogosphere - these may be fuzzy, mercurial things, but they make a lot more sense than this top heavy being which we might term blogosphere 0.0.
• We need to think about influential ideas and influential blogs/bloggers as two separate elements of  any model backing ranking of any sort.

Comments

[Bob Wyman]

Matt, You make a good point that I feel negligent for having forgotten to mention. You are correct is suggesting that if you divide the blogosphere up into "communities of interest" you end up with high, middle, and low ranked blogs in each community. The variability of LinkRanks within each of those mini-blogospheres is distributed in much the same way that it is in the blogosphere as a whole. i.e. Within each community of interest, the top and bottom blogs have relatively stable community-specific LinkRanks while the middle ranked blogs in each division have relatively unstable LinkRanks. One might see fractals here, but I'm not sure if that's the right model.

bob wyman

[mark]

Matt, an update on our statistics. We have just released a version of the PubSub 1000 on our site (http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks1000.php). This list will get updated on a daily basis as part of the normal PubStats process. btw, you can now grab the entire 1000 site list as an atom feed.

In addition, we now allow the ability to order our Top100 LinkRank list based on the nightly link rank, or the rolling 15 or 30 day averages http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php .

Please check it out when you get a chance and let us know what you think.

mark wagner

[Alex]

Nice statics about Page Ranks It is a good way to analyze the content and the users interest,I agree with you that the article must be placed in the correct directory to get searched easily. With Web 2.0 tools now we can easily add more color to our pages thus increasing the page ranks.