PhotoDude.com

Mon. Jul 30, 2001

Talkin' 'bout Blogdex

Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex (via Little Green Weblog, that ”social network” thing this article talks about) – I’ve seen this site show up in my stats (albeit weirdly, as http:\\blogdex.media.mit.edu\ ), and found it quite interesting in its current state when I visited, but this article explains it’s just the beginning. ” ’I think people need tools to help them think about the kind of information they are creating,’ said Blogdex’s creator, Cameron Marlow, a 24-year-old PhD student at The Media Lab.”

Mr. Marlow has devised a way to index some 9,000 weblogs (more to come) daily, track the links to articles they publish, and rank the links by popularity. This provides a picture of ”what’s hot” in the weblog community today, a community that provides a prolific source of timely constantly refreshed ever-changing content. Blogdex taps that pulse and makes some sense of it.

” ’Cameron’s Blogdex is an early example of what I believe will be a revolution in how news and opinion circulate through the populace,’ said John Coate, founder and former general manager of S.F. Gate.” Well, it certainly sounds like the man has big plans for it, and I’ll certainly keep visiting. One of my frequent stops is Web Intersections from Tom and Ian, who do something similar with a smaller selection of high traffic weblogs, but Blogdex appears to up the ante quite a bit, and bring us The Word from the masses.