Warren Seen

Noticed Blogcode last week, signed up and had a play, but haven’t really collected my thoughts on this one. I’ve been flat out with “real” work, etc., so have neglected to write anything this last week.

Anyway, precis on BlogCode is fairly straight forward, drop the name and url (not the feed tho) of the blog you want to code into the UI, then score the blog on a range of sliding scales covering content, tone, etc.

Neat, but essentially useless in and of itself.

The trick however is that the sliding scale scores allow statistical analysis to determine the blogs that match according to the criteria rated. eg for this blog, a range of sites are returned with a 72-78% “match”.

The underlying idea is that over time, as more people code a blog, the ratings will become a more accurate and democratic opinion of the blog in question.

I noticed that they do collect the country that the blogger appears to be from, however it doesn’t seem that you can use this to narrow searches, etc.

The problem I can see with this system however is this: there are a LOT of categories to rank, and although it doesn’t take long with sliding scales to do this, the novelty of assessing a blog over 15+ criteria is going to get old pretty fast.

Additionally, there’s no real incentive to come back to the site again and again. This feature would be more useful as an element of existing blog search (eg Technorati) or built into an aggregator (eg Rojo) as a value add. Imagine you add a blog to your feeds, and get suggestions for similar blogs, with sample content so you can decide whether you want to read them too. Not to mention being able to sort blogs according to their BlogCode “match” level.
Alternatively, it could serve as the basis of a meme tracker in which you can influence the results you see based on blogs you’ve coded.

In short, an interesting statistical experiment, but the model (which has been carried over from storycode.com), doesn’t seem to be that tight a fit with the blogging state of the art. I mean, no RSS feeds, what were they thinking?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 11:43 pm and is filed under blog, blogcode, technorati, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.