Blogs, Authority and Reputation

A big question newbies have about blogs is how do you know that what you’re reading is true? If anyone can write a blog – how can they be trusted? The usual spiel is that blogs are a self-correcting ecosystem and the good stuff floats to the top. Usually the well-linked stuff floats to the top – there are some pretty schmitty A-List bloggers out there.
Tris outlines 2 ways authority can be measured and estimated.
The usual approach is to see what are the most popular things being linked. Sites like Memeorandum and Megite do this:

Regardless, both these sites work on a similar principle. Find a topic, then track all the people linking to that article and related articles. Of course it is impossible to track all of the blogs talking about a topic, so the question will be who do they drawn from.

This is flipped upside down with ideas like BlogCode, where bloggers and readers submit blogs and some sort of comparison algorithm makes recommendations and suggestions on other blogs you might consider reading (it is based on the StoryCode approach). But the drawback to this seems to be the completion of the data set. I went through the BlogCode process for my personal blog and it is 4 pages of options and sliders – are users really going to spend that much time for blogs that aren’t theirs? Couldn’t you just do a del.icio.us approach and just create recommendations that way (granted you will get more than blogs)? Isn’t this like Alexa with less data and no toolbar?
A difference I just noticed is that the first set of options is drawing on ‘what is linked’ and the second one is ‘what is read.’ Interesting.


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One response to “Blogs, Authority and Reputation”

  1. Tris Avatar

    Thanks for the link Andy … yeah that’s exactly it … what is linked vs what is read. Personally I think we need both systems. Both have their own pluses and minuses.
    For BlogCode, I’ve noticed the recommended blogs list on my own blog shifts constantly. Which could be a good sign that the system is getting the data they need to be more accurate in the long-term.

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