Stephen Downes

Grahem Wegner loks to this interesting new service, something called Learning Signal from Social Rank. Whate we have here is a service that looks at blog posts in a community (presumably defined by topic - such as 'e-learning', but we are not told what blogs constitute a 'community') and ranks them according to (a proprietary blend of?) citations, comments, and the like. It's a good idea, difficult to pull off (I've been trying stuff like that with Edu_RSS but the sorts of server loads it creates are horrendous) and even more difficult to make relevant.

Comparing their list with my list is interesting. Ranked at the top right now is Dissertation 2.0, a nondescript post (sorry Wesley) containing no real content, zero links from other blogs, but which is linked three times from other Wesley Fryer posts and has seven (questionable) comments - this community in particular likes to pump its members up. So the algorithm will take some tweaking, and probably needs metrics like readership, influence (sure, it linked - but did people follow the links), community (ie., treating a community link as a self-link, to highlight posts with reach as opposed to posts of mutual support).