Witches Brew Soda Can, 1960's by Roadsidepictures, on Flickr
Jen Weber recently wrote and asked:
Maybe this is a trade secret or something, but what I want to know is how your program determines what is hot and cold for me. What criteria does the program use–keywords, update frequency…?–and are they unique to me? Why should I trust this software’s judgment?
Sorry if the answers are in your blog somewhere. They weren’t in the four posts I read.
I actually dumped my reader contents recently after getting so bogged down that I couldn’t bear to open it for an entire year. I have essentially stopped reading blogs because I can’t keep up with them all. Everyone I know feels overloaded.
We’ve never really given much info on how we define Hot or Cold on Bscopes. Internally, we refer to our combination of characteristics that we boil down to a 1 to 10 ranking as the “secret sauce”. And while we wouldn’t want to spell out every last detail, an overview should help to answer Jen’s question.
Some of the things we measure and evaluate are based on an entire blog. Others are something we look at per blog post. Then we combine all this info together to determine the heat of a blog. Exactly how we combine them all is the secret part of the recipe for the sauce, but here are the most important ones (in no particular order):
Ingredient List
- Recency
How recently has this blog been updated. No posts in the last year? Definitely ice-cold (like vichyssoise). Just posted a few hours ago? It’s red hot (a habanero).
- Updated
This a true/false measure. Has this blog changed since we last checked it?
- Posting Frequency
How often are posts made to this blog. Of course, this will change over time, so we look at the average value.
- Frequency Rank
How well does the Posting Frequency compare to the Bscopes ideal? This one is controlled by our virtual Goldilocks. She’s very particular. So the blog can’t update too rarely, or too frequently. She is happiest when it is juuuuusssst riiiight.
- Update Interval
Is the Posting Frequency increasing or decreasing? Regularity is more important here than some absolute value. (must not make prune references… must restrain myself… must stay out of the gutter) We determine if the blogger is slowing down in their output, or suddenly posting a lot more. We like predictability in our blogs. But a sudden rise in frequency can also be an indication that there is something here to see.
- Authority
Is this blog recognized by others in its niche? Places like Alltop or Technorati try and measure this. But they still don’t cut through the clutter. How the Bscopes users view the blog also influences this measure. So it’s kind of a Heisenberg thing going on as the observer changes this measurement.
- Popularity
Is this blog read by a lot of other folks? There are a number of places that try and track this from Google Reader to Technorati to Alexa traffic scores. Again, it is a measure, but not enough to separate wheat from chaff. (And chaff isn’t much fun to find in your cake.)
- Posting Amount
How many posts has this blogger written? Is this a small blog or a big one? It’s not that size doesn’t matter. Size always matters. But it is also how you use your blog.
- Exhaustion
How fast do new posts go away if they are not read? A blogger that writes 10 posts a day and only keeps 10 posts in their RSS feed only gives you a day to see a post before it is gone. That adds to the urgency of that blog. That can be both good and bad. Conversely, too much time between posts and I can safely ignore a given feed for a while. (“Well, what am I supposed to do? You won’t answer my calls, you change your number. I mean, I’m not gonna be ignored, Dan!” Bonus points awarded if you recognize this quote. Leave a comment.)
- Dialogue
Another true/false measure. Is commenting allowed on this blog? For some folks, dialogue is what a blog is all about. For others, it doesn’t matter much at all. So we keep track of this.
- Comments
How many comments does any given post have? In general, the more comments, the more interesting the post. The reactions of the community tell you about the relevance of the blog post.
- Size
How big is the post? Smaller posts can generally be consumed faster. But then again, a large post may have a lot of valuable content. This ingredient doesn’t mean much on its own — only when combined with other ingredients. Think of it like parsley —it’s a garnish.
- Freshness
How recent is this post? In general, a post from 6 months ago will need some other ingredients to make it Hot. After all, it’s not like a blog post comes with an expiration date. (Hmmmm. I wonder if some of them ought to?) Some posts are timeless such as this one from Seth Godin.
- Links
Does this post link out to other web sites? Other posts on its own site? Does anyone yet link to this post? Links are the currency of the web. So how rich is this post? (Are we talking Donald Trump? Scrooge McDuck?)
- One Way Push Penalty
Some blogs are like a fire hydrant of content just spewing out at you. A high frequency of posts. No comments or dialogue. These blogs make it hard to keep up with them and hard to want to keep up. But, they might be important sources of info so I’m not comfortable dropping it and not reading it, either. So we automatically classify them, and in so doing we knock ‘em down a peg or two so they don’t dominate the rankings. Like you would if you were reading these.
Taste Test Needed
Our experience with Information Overload tells us that everyone deals with this differently. Every cook changes the recipe to suit his/her taste. Tweaking the mixture is something that will show up as a feature on the paid subscription plans in the future. What ingredients would you add? Do we need a pinch more of this? A cup of that? Should it be spicier? Or is this batch too hot?
This is your chance to influence the recipe of the Bscopes secret sauce. We want folks to participate. Share your ideas with us in the comments below.
To join the Bscopes community, enter your email address in the form in the sidebar and subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.
We realized that we have lots of good content on 
(a la 
and 
. For example, he uses Dan’s description of the difference between 1¢ and 0¢ to help explain the uniqueness of free. He also provides detailed information on multiple “case studies” that break down the specific pattern used by that example product or service to earn money using “free”.
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