Tag: blogs

I revealed on Dec 22 that PubSub potentially had made some changes in their LinkRanks application that had a serious negative effect on many sites’ ranking. My blog dropped 32,544 spots in one day, down from 7,495. Well, I didn’t get any answer directly from PubSub, but their CEO made a comment in Trevor Cook’s follow up post.

Hey Guys,

The reason for the sudden shift is that we increased the granularity of how we measure linkranks. Specifically, we added individual blogs from the various hosting services for the first time (e.g. livejournal.com/johndoe) – that has suddenly shifted everyone’s ranking. Bob Wyman, our CTO, dropped 30,000 places (much to his chagrin). Check out his blog for more details – http://bobwyman.pubsub.com

Cheers,

Salim Ismail, CEO

PubSub’s CTO Bob Wyman also posted a comment on his own blog.

The effect of this improvement in the granularity of the LinkRank calculation will take about 10 days to be fully felt. We need to wait for the impact of old links to fade out of the system and for the impact of more recent links to dominate. Once this settles out, it will be fascinating to try to figure out why some sites went up in LinkRank and others went down. In any case, we’ll have more accurate and thus more useful numbers to work with in the future.

Please keep sending suggestions on how to improve LinkRanks — and please forgive what will be inevitable “turmoil” in the numbers as we continue to increase the accuracy and granularity of reporting in the future.

So it seems that the new ranking is more accurate than the previous one, but taken into consideration the drastic changes in rankings, the application maybe was launched too soon. On Nov 18 Ismail said in a press release that “We now feel the system is ready for use by consumers and professionals across the country, and the world”. But as a professional you would want the data from PubSub to be reliable and if changes are made you would expect some kind of information. That information should be clearly visible on the web site, not only on a blog that most people are not aware of. PubSub have yet not published any information on their site about the changes to LinkRanks.

Something seems to have changed with PubSub’s LinkRanks the last 24 hours. My ranking has dropped considerably, and so have several other blogs that yesterday were in the top 10,000, while many others have seen no change at all. I know that the rankings can change substantially overnight, but this seems to be more than a coincidence. For example:

* Adland 36,290 (-35,103)

* CorporateBloggingBlog 42,407 (-22,787)

* Crossroads Dispatches 36,938 (-32,603)

* Earnie the Attorney 37,366 (-33,985)

* Kunal.org 36,553 (-34,735)

* Media Culpa 40,039 (-32,544)

* Micro Persuasion 35,795 (-35,558)

* Mymarkup.net 38,346 (-34,058)

* NevOn 36,733 (-34,674)

Could it be that PubSub are adjusting their system in a way that affects some blogs a lot, while others are not affected at all? Steve, it’s your client. Am I too suspicious or has something changed?

Swedish e-mail list Virus Bulletin (Svenska Viruslistan) has started a blog about stuff related to internet security, reports IDG. It is being run by security expert Per Hellqvist from Symantec, but he points out that it is a personal blog and not an official corporate blog.

Bloggers weren’t named persons of the year by TIME magazine today. Small surprise, George W. Bush did it again, like he did in 2000. But of course it’s not all thumbs up for the President. As he puts it himself: “I don’t expect many short-term historians to write nice things about me.” Nuff said.

But bloggers get their piece of the pie too. TIME writes “10 things we have learned about blogs”:

– Blogging Can Get You Fired

– Bloggers Get Scoops Too

– Bloggers Keep News Alive

– Bloggers Can Be Titillating

– Bloggers Can Be Fakers

– Bloggers Make Money

– Most Bloggers Are Women

– [Presidential] Candidates Love Blogs

– Pets Have Blogs Too

– Anyone Can Do It

Leif Pagrotsky, Minister for Education and Culture today discussed blogs with Tobias Billström of the Moderate Party. Due to the story with SVT journalist Per Gudmundson who had to quit blogging, Billström had asked Pagrotsky:

> if he thought that freedom of speech does not include employees of a public service company?

> if he thinks that individual journalists employed in public service companies can not express views in public, even if they are not in direct connection to the work that they do as employees at SVT?

I listened in to the debate and to summarize briefly, Pagrotsky declined any responsibility for the conflict. These issues are regulated in collective agreements between the employer and the union, and therefore he referred to the board of SVT. In other words, in the name of impartiality, it is ok for a public service company to issue a gag order on its employees. I didn’t really expect him to say anything else.

UPDATE: Billström comments on his blog (in Swedish).

On Sunday, Time magazine will announce the magazine’s Person of the Year, which it has done since 1927. The special issue will be in newsstands on Monday. Some leading contenders are Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Iraq), Mel Gibson (for The Passion of the Christ) and Michael Moore (for Fahrenheit 911). But the winner can also be a guy or a gal in pajamas – bloggers.

The magazine’s managing editor Jim Kelly gives some hints in an interview on I Want Media. “We got a lot of votes for bloggers as the Persons of the Year.”

IWM: Are bloggers leading contenders to be Persons of the Year?

Kelly: I would say that they are contenders, yes. You could name one blog and call it Blog of the Year, or name a group of people and call them Blogs of the Year. There are six or seven people who clearly have a lot of influence.

Via Micro Persuasion.