Slashdot Mirror

Wait a second... his site gets a piddling 3000 page views a day (/. gave it that many in the last hour, in the middle of the night!), and he claims to be making big bucks?

WTF?

Technorati has 16 links in the last three days (many of them this current story), which is nice, but not exactly Boingboing, is it? Alexa has it at a nice, but not spectacular, rank of 32,764 (compare to TalkingPointsMemo's rank of 19,893 or Juan Cole's 19,776), and it barely shows up on Daypop. I don't see where the money comes from with those types of numbers.

Slashdotters who frown upon the blogging phenomenon should realize that Slashdot is considered a blog and tracked by websites like Daypop (at http://www.daypop.com/blogrank/), so if you're merrily whipping these comments out, you are considered a blogger as well, only you're doing it on a community blog.

Blogspotting sounds hip, but it's a shock (yeah, falling-off-the-chair shock) to see the photos of these two Businessweek bloggers who look like they were sent straight from Hollywood Central Casting for "corporate cubicle type"; I mean, put on some Goth makeup or something.

Even though there's not a shred of sense in it, this was very popular in the blogosphere about a week ago, according to Daypop which tracks these things.

I also think it's important to have front ends to this information. Sites such as daypop.com keep track of what's big in the blog-o-sphere. Their Top 40 list shows the most linked-to articles on the net that day. There's also an archive so you can watch how news stories have spread across the blog-o-sphere over time.

I usually skim the links on the Daypop Top 40 every day. When it's working, it lists the top 40 things bloggers are linking to. This is how I discovered a lot of the blogs mentioned in the article. Except for Slashdot and boingboing, I don't read these blogs every day. But the top 40 list works as a sort of daily "best of the blogs" for me, and as the list is politically neutral I get to see what both sides are saying.

Movies: RottenTomatoes, imdb, and MetaCritic have saved me dozens of hours of time I might have wasted on crap (like Matrix Revolutions, or TimeLine).

Books: Amazon, despite its evils (patents/privacy), is a very nice filter (with a few shills and idiot-reviewers). I [ab]use amazon as a filter, and then buy them cheaper new or used.

News: Popular Daily News Tidbits, Blogdex, Daypop, and slashdot.

Music: iRATE radio, and word of mouth. Need more Collaborative Filtering in this area to root out the Clearchannels/RIAAs function as a giant pusher of "cool"

Ads (aka: mental engineering): I use PopFile to filter SPAM, and Privoxy to filter out slow-loading, privacy-invading, all-around-annoying ADS. I'm still missing a proxy for my eyeballs in the real world. Soooon. :)

Cheap Products: Not a quality filter exactly, but a quantity filter: PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, Froogle, Anand's Hot Deals ...

Phew, that's a lot of linkage. Anyway, I couldn't function without these and other filters; I'd really be info overloaded.

Collaborative filtering in general has a very bright future IMO.

--

Daypop (seems to be offline at the moment...)

Feedster

Blogdex and Daypop already are close to this, by keeping track of what the current popular links are. Every time a weblog links to something, it's a vote for that URL. That's the closest to democratization of the media if I've seen yet.

The only thing that needs to happen to match your view is personalization through a web of trust. Perhaps a person's FOAF defines who's opinions they value, and their RSS Aggregregators will rate stories accordingly. I think NewsMonster is working on something like this, but I don't know if it's implemented yet.

I've also noticed this, and have been utilizing Daypop to get some good blog search returns. Most are small, concise, and great resources.

Everybody loves the Iraqi Information Minister!!!

Everybody loves the Iraqi Information Minister!!!

Second Superpower?

imo Orlowski's gripe is unwarranted and Moore's proposition is interesting. Blogs are the big media story of the aggression in Iraq. Even the old, broadcast media (e.g. bbc) are scrambling to get in on it. The key aspect of current media usage is that tv viewing is down, and internet searches are up. People are skeptical and are seeking out alternative sources of information. Blogs are getting crazy traffic. And on search engines "al jazeera" is more sought after than "sex." Story here. This ain't simply armchair resistance; it's a widespread and determined rejection of official viewpoints, and that's way political. The phenomenon suggests that the internet is to some degree realizing its potential for making information free and allowing people to be better informed citizens of the world.

Did Dr.Pepper use Daypop to find the most infuential bloggers?

And what's that list going to look like once Coke and Pepsi get in on the act? Truth in advertising? No way, it's just endless ruminations on the imponderable. Dairy pop. Pop diary. Dairy pop diary. Pop dairy diary pops. Snap crackle dairy pop diary. Pop pop diary fizz fizz dairy pop. Pop pop pop pop pop dairy and pop diary pop.

A quote from my journal entry:

In the case of weblogs you can claim that 'quality matters' and therefore links and pageviews go to the better weblogs, but that clearly isn't the only answer. There are plenty of weblogs of great quality and low readership. In fact the Power Law applies in much the same way to all social systems where people can express preferences in some way. The end result is a star system and, likely, some abuses as people try to cash in on success. Although the cashing in part might be a little harder than for, say, a sports star pushing Nikes: "I only blog with my Compaq! It gets my vacuous rants right."

It sounds an aweful lot like Daypop... But then, I can't seem to access daypop either. Hm.

• eatonweb portal :: the original weblog directory
  
• Blogging Ecosystem
  
• DayPop
  
• o r g a n i c a
  
• Kamat Blog Portal
  
• Jewish Blogs
  
• Weblogs.Com: Recently Changed Weblogs
  
• blogs4God (corrected link)
  

daypop is another good blog scourer, with searching functionality too.

daypop is another good blog scourer, with searching functionality too.

There were 25 hours elapsed between when the boingboing post was made and when the first slashdot story appeared. And since I don't have any overall statistics, I may have to stop arguing this one.

(although there were a lot of blogs that picked this up before Slashdot did.)

There were 25 hours elapsed between when the boingboing post was made and when the first slashdot story appeared. And since I don't have any overall statistics, I may have to stop arguing this one.

(although there were a lot of blogs that picked this up before Slashdot did.)

There was a pretty good article about the "blogosphere" a week or two ago. Very long, and relatively interesting, especially if you are interested in blogs, journalism, news, and that sort of thing. If you have a blog, you might like it too. If you are interested, I've got interview questions sent off to John Hiler, the author of the blogosphere article. I think he'll be getting back to me in a few days. I'll have the interview posted on WebWord.com soon after that.

There was also another story making the rounds about a week ago about making a living from blogging. I was expecting a lot more from it, i.e., some real details on "how to do it", but it was still a reasonable article. It might give you some ideas. Mileage may vary.

Last link whore comments: If you haven't seen Blogdex or Daypop, you might want to check them out. Very nice tools to see what it hot in the world of weblogs.

Several strikes against this story though.

First, if you'll note from one of the snapshots, the machine it's running on is on Winders. Doh! And second (and I've been resisting doing this for several weeks now), although not about the story itself, Slashdot has got stop recycling content from Daypop. It starting to show through guys. At least, if you're going to re-post what is old news to quite a few of us, make a serious effort of getting the attributions (i.e. give Daypop credit for making you aware of it) correct. And perhaps, try to add something new.

I've also found http://www.daypop.com to be a good news source.

Hi,

it occurred to me, since you are evaluating the number of links pointing to a page anyway, that it would be a very nice thing to have a sort of "Top 40 Links of the Day" page, regularly updated to include only new and unique stuff. You could use an algorithm similar to the one used by

http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/

or

http://www.daypop.com/

Both of these sites have become immensely popular through this feature (in the case of Daypop, I find http://www.daypop.com/top.htm very valuable), and I think it would also be a great addition to Google. I don't think inappropriate content would be much of a problem since it would hardly show up high on the list, and besides, a top 40 list can be looked through by a human.

What do you think?

Of course this could be spammed, but as I said, a human could filter the results every day; besides, it would be hard to create a very large number of unique links from different servers pointing to a page. I'm sure Google is already doing some of this to prevent spamming their search-order algorithm anyway.