In January of 2011, millions of Egyptians
rose up against their government in protest. For decades, they were
ruled by a corrupt morass of plutocrats and they finally decided that
enough was enough. The Egyptian youth fueled this revolution. They were
able to rally their compatriots through their blogs and coordinated
protests through Facebook and Twitter. For all of human history, the
balance of power between the elites and the rest of society rested
firmly with the former. This battle proved that blogs and social media
have irrevocably changed that relationship for good. Anyone with regular
access to the internet has an arsenal that enables them to collaborate
with billions of people across the globe instantaneously.
 |
| Pretty amazing what you can do with a computer and an internet connection |
Where do you find blogs & how can you tell which ones are better than others?
It felt like a simple question. I figured that there had to be a centralized site that could direct you to different blogs in a meaningful way. Boy was I wrong.
A simple Google search of "how to find blogs" returns a couple blog posts, a Google product, and not much else.
I scratched my head and thought "This is dumb. Google shouldn't be the only service that can find things on the internet. There are a gazillion people out there. One of them should have figured out how to build something to help a community of hundreds of millions." I dug deeper and found a ton of catalogs and directories that all operated off of one of two philosophies.
1. That clicks = quality
These sites simply measure the number of hits and rank them from highest to lowest. If we were guided by this principle in real life, then Gagnam Style would surpass the works of Plato, Da Vinci, and Aristotle as one of the greatest contributions ever to mankind.
2. Pay me and I'll say you're good
These sites charged some type of fee to appear in their catalog and claimed to have professional editors select only the blogs that "make the cut." I didn't realize that taking someone else's money and putting it in your pocket was all it takes to be an editor nowadays. I guess I'm on the wrong career path.
I realized that because of this, the only way to find good new blogs was basically by word of mouth (or word of tweet, or post, or pin or...you get it). So, I decided to sketch something out that eventually turned into the Pollis. A social network devoted to introducing some type of order to the chaos.
Our goal at the Pollis is to provide bloggers with a free platform to promote their product while attracting a vibrant community of eager readers ready to discover new content.
So, first off, every single person needs to have their own profile page.
And bloggers, you need a profile page specifically for your blog. After all, that's why everyone is here right?
Lastly, there needs to be some way to organize all these blog profile pages. Theoretically, the very top of the catalog should have the best blogs and the bottom should have the worst. So how do we quantify quality? This stumped me for a while until one night, it hit me. It was so simple, I couldn't believe that no one had thought of this before.
Quality is entirely subjective, so whatever the community agrees to be good, is good. So why not give 100% of the responsibility to sort the catalog to the users of the site?
Everyone
has several "go to" sites that they visit all the time when they want
to read something. There should be a way for people to express their
passion for these sites and for those sites to be rewarded for bringing
value to their readers. A simple list of one's ten favorite blogs
should do the trick.
We
all read posts from blogs we don't regularly visit. While these blogs
aren't a necessity for us, they still have informed or entertained us in
some way. We should be able to express our gratitude to deserving
blogs. A 1 to 5 star rating is a quick and simple way to give a blog
some instant feedback.
Those two inputs go into an equation which produces a number that allows us to compare blogs in a meaningful way (for the baseball stat geeks out there, think of it like WAR). The catalog then is simply sorted from high to low. And this is our attempt to answer my question, an answer that we hope will bring the blogosphere even more notoriety.
The Pollis exists for two reasons. The first is to serve as a free method for people of like minded interests to come together.
The second starts with the fact that our traditional news sources have become stale and lazy. This is dangerous for all of us. A strong, independent media is an essential ingredient to a stable democracy. Sadly, the main stream media are the butt of a joke more often than at the forefront of a compliment. I believe that there are plenty of brilliant people in the blogosphere (and trapped inside the machine) who simply need an opportunity to prove that they can be a force in their industry. This is an attempt to give them that opportunity.
E-mail: jacob@pollis.com
For page rank, you might consider a reccomendation system along the lines of Amazon's "Other Things You might want on check out" or FB's "people you may know". These try to personalize content based on the user's history/friends. Here's the graph network behind one developed for Netflix's movie library, and what movies they show you:
ReplyDeletehttp://www2.research.att.com/~yifanhu/MovieMap/index.html?queryField=taxi+driver
It's definitely something for us to think about going forward. As for right now we're looking for something simple and straightforward so people can understand the idea behind the site. But once we get enough users, we can start to build a network to support the relationships between users. That's one of our major jobs going forward. Thank you for the tip!
Delete