If you aren’t familiar with Postrank they provide a scoring system to rank online content based on social engagement. So what they do is track the activity of a blog post to determine interesting or relevant content. Activity can be tracked in the form of blog comments, bookmarks, tweets, and re-blogs. You can get more details about their methodology here. They also provide a widget for your blog to display your best posts based on this scoring system that you can display it for your users. I’ve been using it for a long time on this site and have been very happy with it.
Last week Postrank announced that they were releasing a top blogs of 2009 listing based on the data they gathered for the year. In this post they announce the details behind how they created it. Here’s a snippet:
PostRank gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, like Twitter, Digg, and Delicious over the course of 2009. That data represents the hard work of thousands of bloggers, and is the backbone of our Analytics, Data Services, and content filtering services.
We crunched all of the 2 billion metrics from the past year to rank the blogs by their engagement within each topic populated by our users. In total, we selected nearly 500 topics (491 to be precise) containing 15725 total blogs, and built a detailed profile for the performance of each site – their overall rank, their engagement profile over the entire year, and their top posts as determined by their audience.
I was very flattered last week to find out that Lifestream Blog made an appearance on their list. Below is a screenshot of the page generated for their listing.
click image to visit page
Lifestream Blog got ranked #89 for Social Media and #213 for Technology. When you visit my stats page it will provide details of the engagement score showing the overall activity as well as the top 10 posts from the site. Postrank is only as good as the number of sites it tracks. They were very honest about inevitable issues with this first release of their rankings but are already planning for improvements in 2010’s list. If your site currently isn’t listed I recommend heading over there and adding your site to their great service.
I couldn’t have achieved this without my great readers. I created this site in March of 2007 to provide information on this new concept to share resources with others as excited about it as me. I’ve been overwhelmed with the response and how the concept has taken off. I’ve passionately continued covering the space for almost three years now, and the reason is greatly due to the feedback received from readers of this site. I look forward to continuing writing here and expanding on many of the areas of Lifestreaming.
I think you deserve the most credit, Mark. You correctly scouted a growing meme and have stayed with it beyond the hype and provided much-needed depth of analysis. I rely on you and many others do too.
Thanks Kelly I appreciate the kind words. Another aspect of running the site is that I've also become friends with the founders of many Lifestreaming services such as yourself and have tried to provide them with my thoughts and observations to help improve their services. While my readership isn't huge, I feel that many of those that do visit here are very influential in the Lifestreaming space and part of what I do here also aims to help move it forward.
Congratulations Mark. I believe your blog and your articles offer a great way to see what lifestreaming really is. I hope lifestreaming as much as blogging becomes an activity that is not bound to a single website or system.