Came across another interesting project - SocialRank by MindValley.
Let me first start with MindValley themselves. It’s a young company and growing quite rapidly:
From working in our pajamas with an initial investment of $500 bucks we built a million-dollar company in 2 years (without any venture capital, business plans or loans).
MindValley acts as an idea incubator. They launch 2-3 companies every year, that specialises in one of the three areas: Technology, Media and Marketing.
Now, what so special about SocialRank? It is claimed to work under the same principle as Google page rank, but only for blog posts. The algorithm is meant to identify hottest blogs posts in specific niche.
Relativelly recently they have launched 50 SocialRank sites dedicated to specific niches:
- AgileDaily.com - Agile Development
- AllNightCoder.com - Programming
- AppleFever.com - Apple
- BikingCircle.com - Biking
- ChallengeReligion.com - Atheism
- DailyMovieGuide.com - Movies and Film
- DailyPhotoblogs.com - Photoblogs
- GadgetRoll.com - Gadgets and Technology
- DailyVoices.com - The talk of the town, for any given area
- JournalismDaily.com - Journalism
- JustFlashing.com - Flash and Macromedia/Adobe
- KittyCatCentral.com - Cats and Kittens (Meow!)
- KnittingFriends.com - Knitting
- LearningSignal.com - eLearning
- MarketingLens.com - Marketing
- MathBloggers.com - Mathematics
- MightyBlogger.com - Blog Monetization
- MyCupofJava.com - Java Programming
- NewMediaSignal.com - New Media
- ProductivityZen.com - Productivity
- PRVoices.com - Public Relations
- PythonBytes.com - Python
- QueerFever.com - Queer Lifestyle
- StartupSignal.com - Entrepreneurship
- SweetGaming.com - Computer Games
- SweetSecondLife.com - The World of Second Life
- TheCarInsider.com - Automobiles
- TheLibraryShelf.com - Librarian
- TheMomsWorld.com - Motherhood
- TomorrowsBrands.com - Advertising
- CraftyRascal.com - Kids Crafts
- DailyDogWatch.com - Dogs
- FeministFocus.com - Feminism
- FilmMakerDaily.com - Film Making
- HomeBusinessDaily.com - Home Business
- IndieFilmWatch.com - Independent Films
- InsideManga.com - Manga
- MakeSomethingToday.com
- MicrosoftGate.com - Microsoft
- OracleInsider.com - Oracle
- ParentingWatch.com - Parenting
- PhotoshopWatch.com - Photoshop
- PopFart.com - Pop Culture
- RecruitingWatch.com - Recruiting
- SmallBusinessRadar.com - Small Business
- TechnoratiTop100.com - Technorati TOP 100
- TheBlueAmerica.com - Liberal US Politics
- TheRedAmerica.com - Conservative US Politics
- TheToySociety.com - Toys
- DailyVentures.com - Venture Capital
- RubyGalore.com - Ruby on Rails
And that is just the beginning:
Our goal is to identify the top 1,000 niches on the Net and launch sites to cater to each of these blogger communities. Often we get surprised at the niches we discovered.
On the negative side:
These sites are just one step above spam. The social rank is not a transparent ranking and does not identify the most important posts, but rather is clearly set to get bloggers (who used to at least link to each other) competing for the right to get on a list so that these folks get fresh stuff to put against their adsense.
One might wonder, how is this all related to social networking? Very simple, if this catches up, it allows identifying and forming social groups of similar niche interests automatically.
Thanks for reviewing SocialRank, I really appreciate your write up. However, can you please elaborate and let me know why you say that the sites are just one step above spam?
Take www.MarketingLens.com for example. Everyday SocialRank filters through tens of thousands of blog posts to figure out which stories are the most interesting today. Instead of reading through 400+ internet marketing blogs and their feeds, MarketingLens automatically determines todays hottest stories. Even better, it is NOT the most popular stories (that would be boring because they are always from the same blogs).
So, what let you to the spam analogy? I would really love to learn more and help to clear this up because we hope that SocialRank powered sites will truly help readers easily find todays top stories.
Mike,
Don’t get me wrong, that was just an excerpt from another blog (there’s a link ponting to the exact comment), just to show that people see two sides of that.
I myself think this is a great idea (here’s my comment), in fact this is what I was looking for for some time, how to select most popular/relevant posts on any specific area…
One thing however, why this is spread into many different sites and not a portal which would have sections, etc?