BlogBridge Starz!
Finally. Ever since we started working on BlogBridge, I've been talking about helping a user slice and dice and sort through a ton of blogs and other channels, finding the good from the bad, the interesting from the boring.
Remember the catch phrase "… the ability to follow hundreds of blogs without loosing your mind " which is sprinkled all over our web site. In our next beta you will see the initial instantiation of this idea.
Channels (Blogs and other feeds) in BlogBridge are rated with from one to five stars(unique, isn't it?) These stars will tell you how interesting these Channels are to you.
The secret sauce is in how a certain Blog is rated with one or two or three or four or five starz. This aint AI folks! It's actually pretty simple and flexible.
For each Blog, BlogBridge figures out4 different metrics:
Importance. Using Technorati's API, we figure out how many inbound links there are, and use that as a proxy for importance.
Rating. There's a Thumbs Up/Thumbs down widget where the user can, Tivo-like, indicate subjectively how much they like the Blog
Keyword Hits. The user can, optionally, supply a global list of keywords that are important to them (for me, "Pito", "Salas", "BlogBridge", "eRoom", "Lotus"). This metric is simply counts the hits.
Activity. Using another web based service, we'll try to figure out how actively this Blog is updated.
Given these four metrics (so far, but more can easily be added) we come up with a number of stars to rate the blog. Of course the more advanced user can tweak the mix to get the Starz to reflect their own priorities, using this cool interface.
Given the Starz Rating on each Channel, there are lots of other interesting things we can do for the user. That 's for another time.
