blogdex social network explorer
December 17, 2001 12:15 AM   Subscribe

blogdex social network explorer via Hack the Planet. Who links to you?
posted by otherchaz (11 comments total)
 
Only the people of best quality.

It's a nice idea. I'd like to know how the 'blogdex recommends' bit is worked out.
posted by ceiriog at 3:09 AM on December 17, 2001


And I'd like to know how the "friends" part works....how do they differentiate between just regular old linkage and pal linkage?
posted by jennak at 5:34 AM on December 17, 2001


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.
posted by briank at 5:50 AM on December 17, 2001


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.
posted by gleuschk at 6:00 AM on December 17, 2001


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?
posted by grabbingsand at 7:10 AM on December 17, 2001


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?
posted by dhartung at 8:17 AM on December 17, 2001


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!)
posted by cameron at 8:40 AM on December 17, 2001


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?
posted by briank at 8:52 AM on December 17, 2001


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.
posted by zeb vance at 8:53 AM on December 17, 2001


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.
posted by mathowie at 9:56 AM on December 17, 2001


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
posted by Mars Saxman at 9:27 AM on December 18, 2001


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