Pubsub sees linkrank 'turmoil' as inevitable while 'improvements' made.

Here's a quote from Bob Wyman, Pubsub CTO, in response to confusion over changes it made last night - "please forgive what will be inevitable "turmoil" in the numbers as we continue to increase the accuracy and granularity of reporting in the future."

Why don't they just get it working properly and then give us a heads-up when its stable and accurate which apparently it hasn't been and still isn't.

The effect of this improvement in the granularity of the LinkRank calculation will take about 10 days to be fully felt. We need to wait for the impact of old links to fade out of the system and for the impact of more recent links to dominate. Once this settles out, it will be fascinating to try to figure out why some sites went up in LinkRank and others went down. In any case, we'll have more accurate and thus more useful numbers to work with in the future.

Is this a case of a service being launched prematurely?

Comments

[Hans Henrik]

Hi Trevor

Sure it’s a case of a service being launched prematurely but does it matter?

How important is your linkrank anyway. Sure it’s a measure of something but I’m not really sure about what.

:-)

Happy Christmas
Hans Henrik

[Trevor Cook]

Yeah, I reckon you're right and so is Dave Sifry from Technorati. Any sort of ranking system is crude at best and very vulnerable to 'gaming'. Pubsub's system seems to particularly favour non-blogs and the alpha blogger view of the world rather than the long tail. Though its hard to see how a ranking system could do otherwise, I suppose. I think we should think more about the tail - and the benefits of communities and conversations - than the alphas who spend so much time linking to each other.

[Hans Henrik]

Hi again Trevor

I agree with you again – in fact I can’t see why the so-called A-bloggers are on this so-called A-list. As I see it has to do with something like being there first, knowing the right people and then use the network among them.

It doesn’t say anything about who is important to listen to, who is able to ignite interesting and ground breaking conversations.

For me the linkrank is a funny gimmick telling me little about how others rank’s my blog on behalf of “old-fashioned” metrics.

I hope I – despite my bad English – made my point clear :-)

For me blogging is about opening space for unexpected conversations and relations – linkrank is for that purpose not useful at all.

Best regards
Hans Henrik