Video Ranking

Update - Megite seems to be back now. I note that they have a single Google video (the top one). All the others appear to be YouTube. Over on BlogPulse, there are 21 out of the top 40 which are not YouTube, so I'd guess that both TailRank and Megite are missing a major swath of content.

TechCrunch talks about the launch of video ranking today on both TailRank and Megite. TailRank offers a list of videos with the players embedded in the page for easy viewing. I can't comment on Megite just now as the home page doesn't appear to be up. It is interesting to note a description on TechCrunch's page regarding these memetrackers:

TailRank is analyzing videos that blogs link to and embed on their sites, and then determine what videos are popular based on the aggregate weighted statistics. Bigger blogs get more weight, but smaller blogs get a vote, too.

This seems to contradict the spirit of TailRank - at least as far as the name goes - which ought to be telling us how the tail ranks content. If it is weighting 'bigger' blogs more than others, then it just following in the footsteps of TechMeme which crawls a relatively short list of blogs (TailRank crawls 100k). Perhaps Kevin could comment?

One of the problems with the current set of memetrackers is their inability to cluster items, be they videos or other, around topics. TailRank right now has 5 videos about James Brown - why not cluster these? In addition, all the videos appear to be from YouTube - at BlogPulse, we cover many video hosting systems (too many for me to remember).

I'm also going to point out that BlogPulse (which TechCrunch doesn't cover) silently launched video ranking a while back.

I think that 2007 is going to be an interesting year for this space. Memetrackers intend to support a simple need - to get a quick view/fix of what is being talked about online. Due to their inherent simplicity, it is hard for them to compete on features as feature bloat will work against the limited time that people have to view them. This might suggest that personalization is the way to go (which TailRank is probably leading in). I also think that there needs to be some differentiation between ranking what the head of the blogosphere (topical blogs) is talking about and what the diary/journal blogosphere (all those LiveJournal and other mass hosting systems and social network sites) is talking about.

Comments

[matthew]

Thanks Matt. Megite Video is up at http://www.megite.com/video . We have been working on add more features, such as clustering, in the near feature.

[Matthew Hurst]

Matthew - thanks. Clustering, IMHO, is the next big feature for sites such as yours. I think it gives top priority to what is being talked about and second priority to who is talking about it and which articles are popular. Both are important, but going through repeated content is not interesting! Good luck with this feature!

[Kevin Burton]

We index more than 160k weblogs.......

We do give a boost to influential weblogs but we're careful not to yield an echo chamber so the algorithm is a lot more complex than that. Obviously I can't give a bunch of details.

Anyway... we're always innovating so expect new stuff in short order ;)

[Matthew Hurst]

Kevin,

Thanks for the updated numbers. I took the number I quoted from your interview with Scoble. The algorithms that act as editors on things like TailRank and Google news are fascinating actors in the current web dynamic. While everyone is heralding a new space of content where everyone is someone, the truth is that the efficiency that mass media provides via editorial and programmed content is a requirement now more than ever due to the volume of content. Thus, algorithms are the new editors and they are just as much a black box and potentially biased (though not intentionally) as their human counter parts.

Discuss...