Points systems, blogging and ants...
and why popularity stinks...
For the last couple of months there have been a lot of
articles about the fairness and the accuracy of the point systems, some
articles were highlighting
a few blogs not fitting their criteria, others were pointing the artificial popularity due to external
visitors. I would like to help the debate by proving the opposite.
After all, you can always see a glass half empty or half full...and saying that the
points systems is not working because 2 or 3 blogs out of the top 30 are bad is necessarily
reckoning that 27 are good... So the questions are:
How can we understand the point system? What are its
limitations? Its quality? How can we improve it?
First
Let's try to understand the point system mechanism for
the blog angle, we will examine the bloggers point later. Can we find a simple model
to build our investigation? I think that nature can give us a pretty good
example by looking to the major other specie on earth. I'm talking about
the ants.
Remember when you were a child and you were observing
ants carrying food to the nest. You couldn't help noticing that the linear perfection
of their caravan. Ants are very efficient to explore, find and bring back home
food. Their high degree of organization compared to the size of their brain is
really amazing. Notably, ants are not able to think on their own, there is no
chief ants building a plan to lead the ants to their targets. Still they
find the way to the food and it is oftenly the shortest path
How do they do?
The solution is the way they communicate. Ants
communicate chemically, they emit and detect chemical by using their antennas.
For every move they do, each of them release a substance called pheromone.
The
pheromone stay for a certain amount of time on the ground and thus can be used
to mark the way. This chemical path can by use by the ant to go back to the nest
or by other ants to follow the path for food.
If the ant find food, it come back home
following the pheromone and so leaving a second layer, it will eventually go on
until there is no more food to bring back. Consequently the way will be marked
by all its return journey. 
Other ants in food mission will soon or later find
the pheromone path and followed it and thus highlighting even more the way.
The shortest way is logically found by doing the
quicker return trip, and so leaving an heavier pheromone route than longer
possibility. The pheromone haven't a very long lifetime and thus if a route is
not used for a while it will eventually disappear.
Find the scheme website and more
explanation here.
OK, ants are great but what is the connection to JU
point systems?
Even if you
don't like the idea, please consider every JoeUser visitors and bloggers to be
acting like ants looking for food, but instead Joeusers explore to find, let say
"satisfaction".
Sorry, I can only see that word to define the purpose of researching with
such different and wide interests available.
If Joeusers are ants, then points are
pheromone. Every time someone visit a blog, it leave one
point, ticking the interesting or insightful box leave more
point. Write a comment and you leave even more point. So like ants, websurfers highlight
a way to other bloggers by marking more or less intensely their way.
Logically, blogsites are path that can
lead to satisfaction. However, satisfaction is a blur and wide concept, people
are hardly looking for the same thing. Some like debating politics, others want
small talks other like to shout loudly at everybody else their opinion, and so and so.
Back to our six legged friends, that would be translated into different ants
wants different foods.
Another concept important is the
different kind of User: anonymous person give less point than regular Joeusers
that give less point than power User that give less than Administrator.
Different cats of ants who leave more pheomone because they are considered
better to point out good blog.
Is that all?
Clearly not. Now that the networks has
been defined, and because we are in a dynamic system, we need to understand the
influence of time.
In addition to their point value, articles and comments
create their own dynamics. All the blogsites have this dimension, but JU is
probably the closest to a forum and so time dynamic is a very important aspect of the game.
First, the more article written, the more you
give to people the opportunity to visit your blog.
Second, the more comments generated, the
more you give to people the opportunity to read an article.
Third, blogsite points disappear
after 30 days.
Watching the dynamic allows us to
understand the interaction between bloggers. The points will highlight blogs
with discussions. The more talk, the more talker are likely to come. It is
fairly important because a lot of people here use the 10 more recent posts list.
If you want to score a lot of point and
reach the top 10 blog site, you need people to visit you and to leave some
comments. Specially Joeusers or even if can attract a power user.
Are the points highlighting good blogs?
It is a fairly dumb question, what is
good, what is bad? The point system show blogs that are appreciated by the most
people. If a lot of people like theme about about beetroot jam, then Blogsite
explaining regularly how to do beetroot jam and the best way to eat it with pork
livers will be top 1. This is a very subjective matter.
There are obvious theme, politics or porn
are always popular. Religion or internet jokes score well.
Networking
There is another huge effect: you need
friend. People that visit your blog leave and leave messages. It is different
form the previous paragraph, because a cluster of blogger will eventually turn
into a clique. You reckon clique member as they leave a lot of pointless
comments on each other blogs. Basically it is socializing. It will be
illustrated by ants always traveling in small group to the same food supplies,
sharing them without going back to the main nest and ultimately creating a
different and very dense network full of pheromones. It is a fairly good
strategy. Because it will attract into the new network a lot of other ants and
make all the members blogsites points increasing a lot.
The rise...
The bigger problem with this system
is that top blog will always attract more people than lower blog, it is a
question of being on the shop window instead of the back shelves. Regardless of
their quality, it is just a statistical effect. One side effect of competition
would probably lead to less diversification as once a blog is well established,
it is fairly hard to overcome it. Unless the owner stop to blog.
The only way to solve this problem is to
ensure a continuous growth of the number of JoeUser. The more users, the more
are likely to have different interests and able to constitutes a group big
enough to challenge already classic blogs.
Invasion
Remembering the Janet Jackson nipple
story, a blogsite here went to the top due to a massive number of people wanting
to see the infamous picture of nipple. The blogsite had 2 articles previously,
but the referral were so big that he hit the jackpot. The most popular theme
will always attract a lot of outside visitors and with a relevance given by
Google, you can imagine everything.
Taming the referral is really important
if you want to go to the top.
So... why popularity stinks?
Back to the pheromone/point
arguments, it has been recognized that pheromone are generated also by
human, notably by sweating... so if popularity mean a lot of pheromone...
There will be another article about
JoeUser points.
Feel free to highlight any mistakes.
Pheromone
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/P/Pheromones.html
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml
http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/bio/ento/cooper.htm
http://www.rennard.org/alife/english/antsgb.html
http://www.orsoc.org.uk/about/topic/news/att.htm
Bloggers, Pheromones, and Ants
http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=32&thread=3726
Les fourmis
http://www.sfsite.com/03a/emp28.htm
Chaos
http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/
http://i30www.ira.uka.de/~ukrueger/fractals/
Fractal
http://pnorthov.future.easyspace.com/