Tuesday, March 13th, 2007...10:05 am
I got my Spotplex invitation after all
After waiting a week and getting no reply I thought I’d missed my chance to get into the Spotplex beta, but my invitation arrived today, and I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit and I have a few observations.
For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Spotplex is a service that provides real-time ranking of blog articles, measured by how many times an article has been read, as opposed to say a voting system like digg. I have no idea why Spotplex was even being compared to digg in the first place.
There isn’t any documentation on their site that explains in any detail how it all works but that may be because it’s actually so simple.
I thought they might do some adjustment to create a little parity between the high traffic blogs and the average Joe’s. Something simple like using the ratio of the total traffic for a site versus the number of times an article is read, to fairly make comparisons between sites with different volumes of traffic. That makes sense to me but unfortunately they rank only by total impression count. This means unless you’re getting alot of traffic you probably won’t hit the front page.
The other thing that bugs me is how wildly inaccurate the article read count is going to be for the majority of people. If you’re like me, unless you have a really long article you don’t use the “Continue reading” link, so people viewing your article on the frontpage will never click through to the single page unless they are commenting or coming to your article from another site.
Any of you guys trying this out as well? What are your impressions so far?
3 Comments
March 16th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
I have not checked it out yet but you are right about a weighting system. Sounds like the only way to even the playing field as you would always expect the bigger guys to have a higher absolute reader count.
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:56 pm
You do write a lot of useful posts, and try to get a lot of information out for the public. JUST FYI, “alot” is two words. A lot. There is no such word as alot. It drives me batty that a lot of people can’t write this properly.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Teri it’s a bad habit of mine.
50% if the time I’ll write “a lot”, the other 50% “alot”. I’m used to spell checkers correcting me but Wordpress is lacking in that department.
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