Feb 01 2009
Recent Talk About PostRank
In the past couple weeks, basically since Google acquired Feedburner, there has been quite a bit of chatter about PostRank. Since the Feedburner acquisition wasn’t without issues, the PostRank talk seemed to pick up.
According to their website, PostRank:
… measures audience engagement and provides integrated tools to enable you to customize your RSS subscriptions. Save time, boost productivity, and Read What Matters.
One of the unique things that PostRank does is take into consideration comments and mentions elsewhere on the web (Twitter, Delicious, Magnolia, etc.). It compares it to your recent posts, too. For example, when I first start a blog, getting 1 or 2 comments is a big deal, and thus, will rank that post quite high.
On the other hand, if, 4 months from now my blog has gotten more popular, has more mentions, more comments, that same post with those 1 or 2 comments won’t rank that high.
Having been a Feedburner user since I started this blog last July, I am quite new to PostRank. I have to say, though, after using it for a little over a week, I like it a lot better than Feedburner.
ReadWriteWeb has a great post about the benefits of PostRank, but it also mentions that it will face some challenges, especially with the Google/Feedburner acquisition.
PostRank has a Google Reader plug-in, but (from RWW):
Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn’t always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?
Great question.
There are also other concerns with how it ranks posts, but I do think that they’re headed in the right direction. I can say that I am very excited about their Feed Analytics Beta. They’re even asking for our feedback as to what functionality should be in the tool. Very cool.
I am confused about how PostRank ranks some posts, though. Some look logical, even with the *context* tracking I mentioned above, but I’m still getting posts, published just a few months ago, that aren’t ranking well and should.
Here’s an example. The posts below were posted less than a month apart. The newer one (Analytics is Attitude), gets a PostRank of 7.5 with 4 comments and 1 Google trackback. But if you look below it, another (an older one) gets a PostRank of only 1 when it received 7 Delicious bookmarks, 10 comments, 3 Twitter mentions, and a Google trackback. By the *context* logic, the Twitter – A Different Kind of Conversation post should have been ranked higher, shouldn’t it? I might be missing something. Am I?
What’s interesting is the Google Reader plug-in measures the Twitter post at 9.6. Interesting.
Don’t get me wrong, the concept is awesome. As I mentioned above, I can’t wait for the Feed Analytics Beta, but I need to understand the system better. I’m not completely convinced yet.
Check PostRank out, though. They actively ask for feedback to help continually improve their product, which is great.
Shelby, thanks for the review, we’re really excited about the upcoming analytics products and feedback is always appreciated.
Re: PostRank of 1.0 for story with delicious, twitter, etc. I just double checked and that’s definitely a small bug in our wordpress plugin: it cached the old value and has not yet refreshed the score (whereas the analytics counts are always pulled in live from our API). We’ll be releasing an update to our WP plugin soon and I’ll make sure we resolve this issue.
Ilya
Thanks for the comment, Ilya. Yes, I am very excited for the analytics beta. Hopefully it will be coming out soon!
I’m glad to hear it’s a bug in the WP plug-in and that I wasn’t going crazy. Thanks for clarifying. I went back into WP this morning and now most of my posts are registering a 10 PR – not that I’m complaining
, but that’s obviously incorrect as well.
I’ll look forward to an update and in the meantime I’ll rely more on the GR plug-in.
Thanks again.