Blogosphere
May 15th, 2003 | by Tony Steidler-Dennison |A few months ago, I made mention of an interesting new entry in my referrer logs - blogosphere.us. At the time, it was in an early development stage. One of the developers was kind enough to comment on the entry and was, for a fact, pretty darn nice in expressing concern that I might be irritated by their appearance in the logs.
Two months later, Blogosphere is up and running. It takes a bit of a different tack on “the pulse of the blogosphere.” The slice up the current trends in the blog world, the top sites, and the current events. For this week, the current events look at sites linked to war-related phrases; Iraq, War, Peace and more. Though I’d love to see user input for these current events phrases, blogosphere.us looks to be another useful and interesting metric for bloggers.
2 Responses to “Blogosphere”
By Nick on May 15, 2003 | Reply
Thanks for the kind words, we’re really not trying to be malicious by appearing in server logs. For us, it’s a matter of being honest. We’re hitting people’s servers, and we feel obligated to let them know that “something” (that can be uniquely identified) has read their front page. It’s all part of being a friendly robot.
As for your “user input” comment on the current events page, we’re thinking of three options for future expansion.
1) We’ll search our database for an increasing frequency of “linktext”… but people so often write terrible linktext so a page like this might not be all that interesting
2) Weekly updates of the current events page based on the twenty “hot” links from the top of Google’s Zeitgeist
3) User requested text (via email, or some “running form tally” on the side of the page) - which seems to be the way you’re leaning
Just something we’re working on for the future. Thanks again for the comments.
By Tony Steidler-Dennison on May 15, 2003 | Reply
#3 was exactly where I was headed, though I like the Google Zeitgeist option, too.
Another thought is a straight-up aggregation of the top five or ten phrases in entries within the blogosphere, though that’s pretty similar to Blogdex and others.
Anyway, nice job. It’s always interesting to see how these projects mature. I’ve got you bookmarked and will visit often.