PubSub Sandbox

We’ve put together this FAQ on LinkRanks based on some of the feedback recieved over the past month.

Q: I publish to my blog everyday. Your calculations of the number of entries and outlinks for my blog is incorrect. What’s going on?

A: Every day, PubSub attempts to access the feed for your blog in order to count outlinks, inlinks and new entries. There are times when we can’t get to your feed due to our service “timing-out” on your server. If we can’t access your feed during a certain amount of time, a “time-out” occurs and we move on to the next feed. The next time we are able to fetch your feed, we will gather the data since the last time we read it. This is where the very large number for entries and outlinks comes in. Also, note that if a site has multiple feeds (i.e. RSS + Atom + RDF) we sometimes double count articles. We’re working on methods to reduce such overlap.

Q: Does this affect my LinkRank?

A: No. Linkrank is not based on the content that you post, but the number and quality of the inlinks that you get.

Q: So-and-so linked to me, but it didn’t show up on my LinkRank. Why?

A: The most likely reason for us not picking up an inlink is that the linking blog doesn’t have a feed or that the feed contains “summarized” entries. PubSub only reads the feed of the site.

Q: Why does it take so long for my new blog to get a LinkRank?

A: This is best addressed in conjunction with the FAQ on the submission page. It may take a few days for your blog to get a LinkRank. Using the same criteria as when your site is “live”, you will get a LinkRank the first time your blog gets linked to. This, of course, could take a few days once your content gets into the blogosphere and people locate and link to your blog.

Q: How is my LinkRank calculated?

A: If we told you, we’d have to kill you. Actually, we don’t provide the algorithm for LinkRanks for obvious reasons. If we disclose the details of our algorithm, spammers and sploggers would game the system. In order to provide you with the best possible “game-free” rankings, we don’t fully document the calculations. We regret very much that this is necessary.

Q: Why does my LinkRank fluctuate so much?

A: Your daily LinkRank fluctuates widely as it is inevitable, unless you have a very popular blog, that the number and quality of inlinks to your blog fluctuates on a daily basis. To get a more “stable” view of your LinkRank, take a look at the 15, 30, and 60 day average LinkRanks that we provide. Since these LinkRanks are calculated over a longer period of time, they fluctuate much less than the daily numbers.

Q: What does LinkRanks have to do with Community Lists?

A: We provide the LinkRank for every blog (if it has one) in our Community Lists, however, it is important to understand that blogs are put on the list as the result of a decision by the list editor that the blog is particularly worthy of attention. While the position of a blog on a particular Community List is determined by LinkRank, the decision of whether or not the blog is listed is determined by human editors, not by machines.

Today, we opened up a 30 day average on the Community Lists. A 30 day average of LinkRank provides a more stable view of influence over time. Result? The placement of the blogs will not jump around as much and one can get a better view of the top blogs on a more consistent basis.

For example, compare the daily ranks for the PR Community List…

…to the new 30 day feature

We hope that you’ll find this new feature useful.

-Steven Cohen

Randall Rode is using two of his PubSub subscriptions to add to his TagCould experience. This is a great use of both products and hopefully will increase the use he gets out of both of them. Are you doing anything interesting with your PubSub Subscriptions? Let us know.

-Steven Cohen
scohen@pubsub.com

PubSub has been profiled in an article appearing in the National Post (in the financial post section):

“This technology, once expanded, will be able to tip off users the instant specific automobiles, jobs, concert tickets, cheap flights or goods and services are published.

“For example, if you want to know the instant U2 tickets come up for sale near where you live, the technology will be able to let you know; there’s no point finding out about it a month later on Google, Salim said.”

In order to get a better grasp of what our users want out of the PubSub service, we have put together a very short survey (9 questions). If you get a free moment (It shouldn’t take more tan 5 minutes to fill out), point your browser to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=25751684427.

Thanks!

- Steven Cohen

The PubSub Sidebar is an instant-message-based extension for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. With it, PubSub users can view their subscription results in a real-time scrolling display - it’s the very best way to see matched items as soon as they appear.

We are about to release a new version, and would like to invite all readers to join in the beta-testing process. Though outwardly quite similar, this beta release has the following improvements:

• Auto-reconnect support that reestablishes the session after a network interruption or when the user’s machine awakens from hibernation.
• An options menu for configuring user settings.
• A new option allows display of the PubSub LinkRank of the currently viewed page.
• Automatic detection of LAN proxy configuration, with automatic tunneling through the proxy on port 443, which should enable use of the Sidebar in many firewalled networks.
• Backend improvements to ensure faster and more reliable message delivery.
• Some bug fixes to improve stability.

We are also working on a new release of the Firefox sidebar in order to fix some compatibility issues with Firefox 1.5, and will soon be issuing a beta version of that as well. If you’d like to help us test either of these, please write to us at sidebar@pubsub.com.

Thanks!

Malcolm Pollack and the PubSub Team

One consistent feedback message that we have received about the community lists is that they are not searchable. Well, today we’ve added that functionality. Searching within a defined set of similar resources allows for a narrower focus of results. Considering the high volume of feeds we look at everyday, the search function is a worthwhile feature.

After entering your keywords, the normal PubSub results apply. Grab the subscription feed provided. Then bookmark it, put it in your favorite aggregator, or use the sidebar. Whenever the PubSub engine matches your keywords to those on the blogs in the community list, you will be notified. For those that like to create extensive queries, take a look at the boolean help page, as all operators are live for the community lists search.

One more feature. When edit your subscriptions (you can only do so if you have an account), there is one more option available. You can search more than one list (For example, search the Librarian and Law List if you are researching copyright issues).

We are in the process of gearing up for more lists and features. We will be releasing the next feature within the next week. If you have an idea for a list and would like to be the editor, send us a note to feedback@pubsub.com.

-Steven Cohen

In her post on blogging addiction, Kami Huyse of Communication Overtones runs off a list of “You know you’re addicted to blogging when…” bullet points. On the list:

“You stay up until midnight to check your PubSub PR stats to find out how you did that day.”

And I thought I was the only one who stays up late to check my linkrank.

Steven Cohen

If you are one of those SiteStats junkies (if you have to ask, you probably aren’t one) who must know right away if your blog has risen or fallen in the rankings for the previously day, you’ve probably seen a marked improvement as to when your data is delivered. Our engineers have been working night and day to bring your rankings to you (Did you know that you can have them sent to your aggregator? Just click on the Atom button after running your URL.) as soon as humanly possible.

Also, since the Community Lists use LinkRanks, these too are updated just past midnight for the previous day. I can just picture the PR community refreshing their page every 5 seconds after the stroke of 11:59PM to see how they fared. If there is one community that loves the lists, it’s those in the PR industry. And we love that.

Hopefully, by the end of the week, I will be able to announce a new feature for the lists…

Steven M. Cohen
scohen [at] pubsub [dot] com