The PubSub Weblog

PubSub Link Ranks

PubSub is happy to announce Link Ranks! Link ranks are our way of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in weblogs.

Whenever PubSub reads a weblog entry, we pull out any links appearing in the text. We use these links to provide "Referenced URI" query capability, allowing PubSub users to subscribe to domains, sites, or file types.

We're now using these links, and the source weblogs, to construct our link ranks. Visit the link ranks page to check out the top 100 sites, or to find out where your site ranks!

Link ranks aren't just a count of links appearing in weblogs. Rather we use value and time-based point scoring systems to represent the relative strength of links over time. To check out the current rankings, visit the link ranks page at pubsub.com/linkranks. You can read more about link ranks, and the formula we use to compile rankings, at pubsub.com/linkranks-about.

For more information, check out the about page. Have a comment, or a suggestion for using link ranks? Send us an email at feedback@pubsub.com.

A Bit More Control: Boolean Subscription Queries

In order to provide a little more precise control over subscriptions, we're offering a new Boolean subscription page that will let you construct very complex subscriptions:

https://www.pubsub.com/weblogs/boolean

Before you use the Boolean subscription page, please review the notes and instructions on creating Boolean PubSub subscriptions. In particular, this will give you some information on the attributes (field names) you can subscribe to.

We'd be very interested to hear your feedback. If you get a chance to try the Boolean subscription page, please drop us a note at feedback@pubsub.com.

MyStack.com

MyStack.com lets you build Stacks - self-updating link lists that you can paste into your blog or web page. The Stack on this page lists the last few posts that linked to PubSub.com. You can build a Stack that lists all the posts which link to your site, or a Stack that lists every message talking about a particular topic.

MyStack.com uses PubSub's matching engine to match blog entries and newsgroup posts against your request in real time. That means that any time you look at a Stack, you're looking at the most recent set of links - we rebuild the Stack and rewrite the HTML for you, automatically.

Building a Stack is easy - just visit the website and type in your search terms. You'll be able to configure your Stack to get the look and feel of your website (or if you like, a totally different look and feel).

Try out a Stack, and let us know what you think!

Why do we ask for your Email Address?

We recently came under some criticism on Dare Obasanjo's blog for requiring an email address from our users. His point was that a function like search shouldn't require that kind of personal information. Fair enough. What he's missing, though, is that we're not a search service.

When you create a subscription on the PubSub site, we store your request and return results as they happen. Since the susbcription is ongoing, users need a way to cancel their old subscriptions and retrieve a list of their existing subscriptions - and this is what the email address provides.

We use email addresses instead of user accounts. We had a lot of debate internally about whether we should use full accounts (meaning sign up, create password, log in) or just use email addresses to simplify things. We decided to use email addresses for the time being to make the process easier. This means that any time you want to interact with the service - to cancel a subscription, or retrieve your current list of subscriptions - we use email to verify who you are.

What we do is publish-subscribe (that's why we're called PubSub). When you subscribe on our site, we're creating a persistent query for whatever you've requested. From that point on, any time that data comes up - whether it's in a weblog, a newsgroup, an SEC filing, or whatever - we deliver it to your subscription. When you're viewing the results immediately, as in search, you see everything that already exists that matches your query. With us, you see everything that is going to happen - as it happens.

This means that we create an ongoing relationship with our users. When you subscribe, we check every piece of data coming through our system, from that point on, against your subscription. Because of the way our system is built, one subscription doesn't consume a lot of resources. However, we want to limit the number of unused or unwanted subscriptions. Therefore we require that the user "own" the subscription, and be responsible for it. Users can cancel their existing subscriptions or find their old subscriptions using their email adress.

If you want to search for something, there are lots of places you can go. Feedster provides a great blog search; Google searches newsgroups; and you can get EDGAR data straight from the SEC. We don't provide search on our site because it's not what we do - we don't feel we can add anything new to search, so we leave search to other people. It's our publish-subscribe capability that makes us special, so we're focused on that.

We do offer a lot of content you can access without an email address. For example, check out our pages on politics or the NCAA Tournament. You can read these feeds or check out the graphs any time you like, and there's no signup required. But when you create a subscription yourself, and start an ongoing relationship with us, we want you to "own" your subscription, and to do that we need an email address.

PubSub is 5-for-6 in the Oscars

For the last several weeks, PubSub has been tracking conversations about the Oscars. We're pleased to note that our charts measuring total conversation volume predicted 5 of the 6 top awards (and in the one category we missed - Best Actor - we were within a few percentage points).

What does this mean? Probably nothing. We wouldn't presume to say that one performance was better than the next, or that anyone deserved to win. However it's a nice indication that the conversations and the weblogs we watch really represent society, and that by connecting to this conversation you can connect to the world around you.

This morning, as you might expect, the conversation in the Oscar feeds has shifted to the winners. We'll keep these feeds around for a while, and even after we take them off our website you can still use the URLs to read the feeds in your news aggregator.

If there's anything you'd like us to track on our website in the worlds of entertainment, politics, technology, or anything else, send us an email at feedback@pubsub.com.