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Press Room

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These are some common questions and brilliant questions that we’ve received from bloggers, contributors and the media. Feel free to re-syndicate these on your blogs if you write about us (and we hope you do)

The Big Idea

In a nutshell, explain SocialRank? What’s the core need?
Where and when did you get the idea for something like this?

The Technology

Can you shed some more light on how the SocialRank algorithm works for ranking stories?
There are many social media and social bookmarking sites out there; big ones like digg, reddit and propeller that cover broad niches and then smaller ones like DailyHub or Sphinn. All of these are based on voting from the community, but yours is not. Is that the key differentiator?
How do you handle cases of less popular blogs that have killer content? If I were to submit such a blog to one of your sites, will it get recognition somehow?
How well can you ensure that the algorithm picks stories as well as a human would? If you had time to read all of these marketing blogs and select the 15 most interesting, influential, or inspiring stories, how well do you think that would correlate to the rankings on MarketingLens?
Is there any way bloggers can game the system? Do you anticipate any problems there?

Comparing SocialRank to Existing Services

There are some very well established ranking sites such as 9rules that have quite a following. Is your algorithm going to give you the edge?
There have been a number of attempts to rank blogs, including content analysis, bloglines subscribers, technorati rank, google page rank. How does this differ?
How much of it is inspired by Google’s PageRank? In what ways does SocialRank differ from PageRank
What makes SocialRank different from AideRSS, which uses PostRank to filter feeds and allow users to subscribe only to the top 50% most popular of their selected feeds?
What makes SocialRank a better indicator than Technorati?

The Team Behind SocialRank

What qualities did you look for in creating the Social Rank team of employees?

Future Plans

Some of my favorite blogs are multilingual or not in English at all. Will they be included or is this service only for blogs written in English?

The Big Idea

In a nutshell, explain SocialRank? What’s the core need?
Question from Ben Yoskovitz, TheInstigatorBlog

Part of the idea came from reading the book “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. Anderson write about how the Internet has a caused a surge in content and choices for anyone seeking information in a niche area.

Looking for articles on Entrepreneurship? Well there are hundreds of blog posts going up daily on the topic.

But this causes a problem….YOU have limited time. Out of the hundreds of new posts on entrepreneurship that went up today - which ones do you pay attention to? Surely, they can’t all be good? With limited time, you only want to focus on the hottest stories.

Chris Anderson noticed this problem. In the Long Tail he writes that people get overwhelmed by the huge array of choices - and the way to solve this dilemma is to ensue that filters are in place to help people choose well. They should exist a way for anyone to instantly see the top 10 entrepreneurship stories in the blogosphere today - WITHOUT having to waste time shifting through thousands of blogs.

We wondered if we could solve the problem with math. And that’s how SocialRank emerged.

Now if you’re looking for today’s top news on Entrepreneurship - just visit StartupSignal.com and it acts as a filter to make sure that out of the hundreds of new posts on entrepreneurship - only the best ones get to you.

We have hundreds more launching, covering such diverse topics as Motherhood, Photography, Manga, Atheism, Burma, and US Politics.

Where and when did you get the idea for something like this?
From Geoff at GearFire.Net

We started out running a blog network. I owned several blogs on marketing, including blog.mindvalleylabs.com and marketingsqueeze.com.

But as the owner of a rapidly growing company, I was finding it harder and harder to maintain blog postings. A lot of people were coming to Mike Reining (our co-founder) and I for marketing advice and we felt we could not keep up. So we wondered if there was a way we could automatically identify the hottest marketing stories of the day and serve these up to our fan base.

We played around with multiple options for a whole year. We owned a popular social bookmarking site called BlinkList.com and we owned around 9 blogs, so we had some room to experiment.

Nothing worked. But accident we happened to have a mathematician on our team. A bright guy from Delhi IIT, one of the most prominent engineering schools in the world. Talat tried to solve the problem with math and SocialRank was born.

The Technology

Can you shed some more light on how the SocialRank algorithm works for ranking stories?
Question from David Berkowitz, InsideTheMarketeersStudio.com

Well there is a large number of factors and we constantly tweaking the algorithm to make it better and better. But here are two of the biggest.

First, backlinks. How many other bloggers in your field point to your post. This is usually a sign of a good post.

Next, comments. We actually “read” your blog and make a note of how many comments you’re getting in a given time period. The comments are a good indicator of quality content.

Theres a lot more to it than that of course. But we have to keep the actual algorithm a secret to avoid spammers gaming the system.

Our approach has two bug advantages:
1. There is no need for a blogger to add a widget on their blog for their content to be analyzed by SocialRank
2. There is no need for people to “vote” on content.

Once your blog is added to SocialRank, we can automatically study and analyze your post and make a conclusion on how important it is.

This gives us the power to launch hundreds of niche websites tailored to different blogging categories. We don’t need to wait for bloggers to add a widget to their blog. Nor do we need to wait for a new SocialRank-powered site to gain enough users for voting to be accurate.

Instead we can launch new sites within 24 hours. And the sites will have good content and well ranked postings even before the first visitors arrive. This allows us to move quickly into new niches.

We have hundreds of sites launching, covering such diverse topics as Motherhood, Photography, Manga, Atheism, Burma, and US Politics. We’re also launching geographic based sites, this falls under a different domain called DailyVoices. We are now filtering the best blog posts from different countries, cities and regions worldwide. There are 200 DailyVoices sites launching. You can see the first few at NewYork.DailyVoices, Sudan.DailyVoices.com or Belgique.DailyVoices.com.

There are many social media and social bookmarking sites out there; big ones like digg, reddit and propeller that cover broad niches and then smaller ones like DailyHub or Sphinn. All of these are based on voting from the community, but yours is not. Is that the key differentiator?
Question from Ben Yoskovitz, TheInstigatorBlog

Absolutely. Here’s why voting is problematic.

On big sites like Digg - very very few people actually vote. I read some studies that say only 3% of viewers bother to cast a vote. Now Digg is so big that this 3% is still a large group of people and hot stories do emerge.

But on smaller niche sites like DailyHub - this becomes a problem. Anyone can launch a mini Digg or Reddit for their niche. But once you go into niches, your audience is simply not large enough to make the votes count. Remember that only 3% of the audience would actually vote.

As a result, these sites struggle and never really end up with solid enough data. It’s a catch 22 situation. Without the audience, you can’t get good data. And without good data, you can’t get an audience.

So we pushed our engineers to devise a solution that would not require voting buttons. SocialRank was the result.

SocialRank powered sites like StartupSignal.com or MarketingLens.com have good data EVEN before the first visitors arrive.

How do you handle cases of less popular blogs that have killer content? If I were to submit such a blog to one of your sites, will it get recognition somehow?
Question from Ben Yoskovitz, TheInstigatorBlog

SocialRank actual seeks to level the playing field and give newer bloggers a chance to catch up. SocialRank studies only the content on your blog and does not take into account any metrics that come from how long you’ve been blogging. Think of this as a form of “Brand Dampening”. We dampen the influence of brand-name bloggers from skewing the data.

For example, we know that long established blogs tend to score better in terms of bloglines subscribers, technorati rank, google page rank etc. If we followed just these criteria, a new upstart blogger with some great content but little history in the field would have a hard time gaining attention.

Let’s say you just started a blog about Startup Advice. And you just wrote a great post that got tons of backlinks from Digg and Stumbleupon. It’s slowly being picked up across the web.

Now let’s say in that same day, Guy Kawasaki (of http://blog.guykawasaki.com/), perhaps, the pre-eminant blogger on startup advice wrote a post about going on vacation for a week - interesting to his readers perhaps but not anything to do with startups.

If we just looked at the usual criteria, (bloglines subscribers, technorati rank, google page rank) Guy’s post would score higher than the new blogger with the great article. But We take this into account with our math and dampen the value of Guy’s brand in unfairly influencing the quality of the content on StartupSignal.com

The new guy - is now playing on a level playing field.

So we don’t care if you’re The New Guy or Guy Kawasaki. All we care about is your content.

How well can you ensure that the algorithm picks stories as well as a human would? If you had time to read all of these marketing blogs and select the 15 most interesting, influential, or inspiring stories, how well do you think that would correlate to the rankings on MarketingLens?
Question from David Berkowitz, InsideTheMarketeersStudio.com

I think they would correlate quite well.

When we designed SocialRank, we tried to make it emulate human nature as much as possible.

How do humans react to good stories? Well they tend to re-syndicate or blog about these stories. They also tend to comment on the stories. Or save them in Social Bookmarking Sites. Or tell their friends about them. We look at this sort of behavior.

For example, you’ll notice that SocialRank studies the comments on blogs and make a note of what stories are getting the biggest amounts of comments over a given time frame.

This is just one of the ways we identify a hot story.

Is there any way bloggers can game the system? Do you anticipate any problems there?
Question from David Berkowitz, InsideTheMarketeersStudio.com

Yes, some bloggers will try. But here’s where we have a slight advantage. On a site like a Digg, you can hire professional “voters” to vote up your stories.

But on SocialRank, one of the big things we look at are comments on your own blog post. So to game SocialRank, you would need to hire people to comment on your own post. In other words, you’d have to hijack your own blog to game the system. This leaves you with having to fool your own readers. The comments,are after all, there for everyone to see. Many bloggers would not want to be caught doing this and we think it will help keep our system cleaner from spam.

Spammers will continue to be a problem. We’re fortunate that we already had to deal with this issue on our previous project, BlinkList.com and so our team has some experience dealing with the problem.

Comparing SocialRank to Existing Services

How much of it is inspired by Google’s PageRank? In what ways does SocialRank differ from PageRank?
Question from David Berkowitz, InsideTheMarketeersStudio.com

Unlike Pagerank, SocialRank has a time variable withing its algorithm. New stories tend to get favoured over old stories.

What makes SocialRank different from AideRSS, which uses PostRank to filter feeds and allow users to subscribe only to the top 50% most popular of their selected feeds?
From Geoff at GearFire.Net

AideRSS is a great service, but only if you are stuck to a particularly feed.

Think of it this way. If you like comedy shows on TV, would you just stick to one channel - say Comedy Central? Or would you rather prefer to be able to jump across channels, NBC, BBC, ABC, depending on what shows are hot. Most people would say the latter. The channel is not important. It’s the quality of the show.

Now let’s relate this to a niche blogging field, say productivity.

Some people may want to stay subscribed to only LifeHacker. But most others may prefer to read productivity posts that are good - irregardless of what blog they come from. The “brand” of the blog is not important. The quality of the post it.

So while AideRSS is great if you want to stick to the RSS feed of just one blog. (think one channel). SocialRank allows you to look at the entire spectrum of Productivity Blogs and pull out the best content.

What makes SocialRank a better indicator than Technorati?
Question from Mike St. Pierre, TheDailySaint

I love Technorati. But it did not solve our problem. Let’s say you’re looking for posts on Productivity.

If I go to Technorati now and type in productivity half the links involve posts about factory “productivity” and not personal productivity. If I try typing in “personal productivity”, I get another problem. Now many productivity posts that do not include the word “personal” get left out.

In other words, keyword searching does not solve the problem.

But there is another problem with Technorati. Technorati, with it’s Technorati Rank, favors well-established bloggers.

We feel that part of the joy of discovery involves being able to find lesser known blogs with great content. So SocialRank does not take into account how well-established a blogger is. Instead we look purely at the quality of their current writing. We create a level playing for all bloggers.

In other words, a newly launched Productivity blog with a low pagerank, could still make it to the first page of ProductivityZen if the blogger had great content. But he would not easily get noticed on Technorati.

The Team

What qualities did you look for in creating the Social Rank team of employees?
Question from Mike St. Pierre, TheDailySaint

When Mike and I moved from New York and San Francisco to Malaysia, we discovered that many Asian companies don’t really understand how to nurture bright talent. So we adopted many of the HR policies we experienced ourselves while working for companies like eBay or Microsoft.

Our employees get flexible-working hours, Macbooks that they can take home, rent subsidies, killer apartments, free trips to Bali, parties at the hottest bars and clubs and team-retreats to paradise islands.

We look for people who are amazingly bright, naturally rebellious, and highly ambitious. We then let them go crazy with their ideas on changing the world. We found that highly intelligent people need a very different kind of work environment from normal folks. So we built the entire company culture around their needs.

And it’s paid off remarkable. We’re growing rapidly, and attracting top talent from around the world. We’ve never needed a drop of investment or VC money, and we’re highly profitable.
It all comes from being able to attract, motivate and retain insanely bright people. Information on our work culture and on applying to MindValley (the company behind SocialRank) is available here:
www.MindValley.com/jobs/

Future Plans

Some of my favorite blogs are multilingual or not in English at all. Will they be included or is this service only for blogs written in English?
Question by Jody from SavannahChick

For many of our niche categories we may eventually launch non-English versions. We’re already doing this for regional sites like the SocialRank site for Belgium bloggers, Belgique.DailyVoices.com.