Points systems, blogging and ants...

The ant and the cicada

a brief introduction...

I have written recently an article trying to demonstrate and explain the point system related to JU's blogsite, Points systems, blogging and ants... I was using a comparison with ants behavior to find and gather food in the quickest way. I The conclusion was that bloggsite points are revealing about the quantity of visits generated by a blog, that this is an efficient system to highlight what most of the people are interested in and that it will give always an advantage to top blogsite.

This article will be from a different nature than the previous one, as I intend to shed dome light on a different aspect of the JU points system by looking from a statistical angle. For that purpose I had chosen to collect data from the top 25 bloggers. These data are freely available to whoever come on the website, I made a public announcement to this very bloggers to have their agreement and get positive answers or no answers. Qui ne dit mot consent... 

However, I'm strongly against naming people using this article. The only people who will be named explicitly are Draginol and me, mainly because he is the top, and I'm the bottom of the sample.

I have tried to make this simple, fun and easily readable. It is a long article, but I hope you will enjoy it.

But first erratum...

From the previous part, I get a couple of useful comments. One of them was pointing the offensive aspect of the world "clique". I would like to rectify that by using the world "cluster" which is much more in the spirit of the article. If anyone get offended by the term, I apologize sincerely. I had read this word in a couple of blog for describing clusters of bloggers and my vocabulary is still limited. 

Another comment was also pointing the fact that people don't think strategically when they blog. My first answer was that you can follow a winning strategy without intending to do so because learning is an iterative process. (in example: you know that you shouldn't let you hand on the heater, but you don't know why you get burnt, either the thermodynamic or biological aspect... )

I will explain my second though later. 

The blogger point system for beginners

The blogger points are unsurprisingly more personal than blogsite, but what are they referring to? 

Well, a blogger has three possibilities to express himself on JU:

• Writing an article

• Writing a comment

• Giving a positive or negative bonus to other's contributions

Consequently bloggers have three possibilities to get points:

• Writing an article

• Writing a comment

• Get a positive or negative bonus to other's contributions

So blogger points reflect both your blogging activity (articles) and your interaction with other JU bloggers (replies, other's comments and other's appreciation on your comments).

Consequently, we can write the following relation, using the appropriate coefficients:

User point = # Articles  x 15 + # personal comments x 5 + other's comments x 5 + Other's appreciation

Out of the 5 parameters, 3 are known and 2 are out of our reach (except if you are an administrator and I'm not). I propose to gather the two unknown parameters under the name 'external points'. This points are given by other bloggers and that 's why there aren't accessible.

Our relation become:

User point = # Articles  x 15 + # personal comments x 5 + external points

From that, I have  built the following table in which I have compiled the data from Draginol (1) to me (25) available the 8 of may 2004.

As a rule for this table and others, yellow will highlight the highest value and green the lowest value in each category. All of you know this rank, at least the first 10. The average value are compiled at the bottom

Table 1: what we all see and a little bit more

The data used for building this table are available for download at Sir Peter's. Here

Unsurprisingly, Draginol is first for the point, the number of articles and the external points and I'm at the bottom with 8 time less points, 4 time less articles,  three time less comment and 24 time less external points. 

At first, I was feeling quiet ashamed, but i noticed than all these proportions were becoming less tragic when compared to the three next contenders. Let me be clear, if you had any doubt, that  Draginol is not the most representative blogger here, and as a statistical point of view, he is a singularity.

Conclusion

To a few exception, the external points seems to be highly correlated with the user points. It shouldn't surprise anyone, the more popular blogger are logically gaining more points from others. 

The ant and the cicada

I was sure that more information could be obtained from these data. But we have to work it a little more and think about the nature of our blogger production here:

Articles and comments are deeply different in their communicative nature. Articles are more personal statement whereas comments are interaction and communication. In addition, they don't require the same investment in time and research to write.

It remind me that tale that all French children learn and called "The ant and cicada".  Here is the tale to all the lucky people who hadn't been forced to learn it at school:

The Cicada, having sung
All summer long,
Found herself wanting
When the north wind came.
Not a single morsel
Of fly or tiny worm.
She went begging for food
To her neighbour the Ant,
Asking her to lend her
Just a few grains to get by
Until the next season.
"I will pay you back, she said,
Before August, animal's honor,
Interest and principal."
The Ant is no lender:
This is the least of her faults.
"What were you doing during the warm days?
She said to this borrower.
--Night and day no matter what
I was singing, like it or not.
--You were singing? I'm very glad:
Very well, start dancing now."

Insightful isn't it?

The connection, please?

Simple, forget about the ant as a cold and greedy bastard, but see it as an industrious bug, that work regularly and with obstinacy. In contrast, The cicada spending her time having fun and socializing. Related to blogging, ants are writing articles, cicada are writing comments.

And I mean no offence to either cicadas and ants.

So from the last table, I build a new one but I ranked the bloggers using the ratio (Comments/articles), just to see what kind of bug lead the top 25. Practically, this is the number of comments written when you write one comment.

Table 2: From cicada to ant

The data used for building this table are available for download at Sir Peter's. Here

We can observe two extreme kind of behavior, with social people at the top and writers at the bottom. Draginol and me are now in the middle, so there is no obvious relationship between the behavior and external point... Based on Draginol position, you might even give the advantage to the ants. Think again and check the 10 first people to get external point (marked in blue). They  are more likely to be cicada. 

So it seems that cicada get more external point than other. In other words, comments, when used properly, are a good way to attract external points.

Advantage of being a cicada

Now, we can be a little more explicit about the cicada strategy.

The first advantage and the more obvious is that you leave a link to your own blog when you write a comment. If anyone like your reply, then they can go to your blog. This is Advertisement.

You can leave a lot more of comments than articles. This article took me one week to write, the quicker I have ever been, required a 15 minutes job. They both gave me 15 points and I really didn't think that the shorter was good. This is productivity.

If you leave relevant comments, you expose also to public judgment, people will give you rating increasing your score. If you leave a comments on a blog which is very visited, then you allow this to happen a lot. This is Popularity

The price of controversy

However there is a big inconvenient in this strategy due to trolling, if you leave controversial comments, you can be violently reminded that sometime the majority of the people would like you to keep it shut. That's cruel, but that's necessary. 

More and more

I'm sure that there are some other effects but it seems to me that those are the main one. Let me know if you think that I'm wrong or you see other rules like this. After all, I'm more an ant than a cicada...

And?

Another transformation was necessary, because table 1 and 2 shows the points gained but doesn't really show how much efforts have been spend to obtain them. So I decide to divide the external point value by the sum of the number of articles and the number of personal comments. This is suppose to show how much your effort have been successful.

Table 3 Not everybody will like this one

The data used for building this table are available for download at Sir Peter's. Here

You can now notice that the rank has been substantially modified from the last table. And that there is a strong variation between the first and the last. Draginol is still #1 and the bottom hasn't really change. The big surprise was that half of the people who are now in a totally different position.

Sorry for the people that went down but I have highlight in blue the one with major differences (> 8), the white one are with minor differences (<5)

This rank show the efficiency of bloggers, the one that independently the quantity they produce, manage to interest and stimulate the most the community.

Any relation with the cicada/ant rank?

The 12 highest cicada are in red and if you can see a pattern of distribution, just let me know, but so far I can't see anything.  So the cicada are more productive but not necessarily more efficient.

Is this useful?

If you have any doubt about the validity and interest of this assessment , I can tell you for sure that Stardock is using something similar, check the last column to see who is power user (level 2), and who isn't.

Is this a better way than the actual point system?

Yes and no, we know now who is more efficient, but the actual JU rank system show the more productive. 

So who is the best blogger?

This is a stupid question. Like the blogsite point, it just shows how the JU community see you, as there is no absolute value for blogger. So no one should be disappointed,  some people are more in phase with the community than other. And that's what shows table 3

Is this flawless?

Certainly not. 

There is a mathematical flaw, the number of comments can be really bigger than article making the addition of the two not really representative. I have try using the square root of comments but, The ranking isn't changing deeply but I would believe it to be more accurate. However, this discussion isn't glamorous enough to me, so let's stay out of it.

There is one from the system, if you create and delete an article, you will gain 15 points and not stay at  the same amount of point. I suspect that the points attached to a specific article aren't disappearing with it either. So, in this perspective, the determination of efficiency is biased, and a little bit more than the productivity one. Apparently, it doesn't work the same way with the comments, deleting one will remove the associated point.

The last flaw also come from the size of the selected blogger sample, 25 is too small. (Forgive me but i have other thing to do than compile hundreds of number...). The consequences are that we are realistically talking about the more prolix bloggers. There is a large majority of people that are doing less talking or writing and so are totally ignored.

I think that people who see themselves going down really badly, should think about trolling. It doesn't change the number of total "action" but can reduce your userpoints substantially. But it will remind you that being trolled isn't just about point, it is about your popularity among with other JoeUser here.

I was happy... then came KarmaGirl...

In my calling blog,A call to the top 24 bloggers, I got a comment from KarmaGirl basically saying what I have just explained. I felt a little bit embarrassed because it was giving away a part of my article. I'm not so keen to make a public call just to say that I have reinvented the wheel...

So I felt challenged to go on and try to find something else. 

The shortage of new data were a problem. But there was one that I hadn't exploited yet.

The time machine

On your profile, you can read the first blog date. So we have access to the number of day spend blogging and thus we have access to your blogging speed (number of article + number of comments divided by the number of day blogged). From he previous data, we can calcul also the efficiency related to the userpoints and no more to the external points. (user points/number of article + number of comments )

Thus we can build the relationship, (type Y = AX + B)

User point (in y days) = blogging speed x user point efficiency x number of day (y) + actual user points 

This relationship can allow us to estimate the user point for any Joeuser at any time. 

NB. I know that the blogging speed and userpoint efficiency factor could be simplified into one coefficient, but I though it would easier to understand this way.

I have compiled these datas along with the other, and build new table allowing us to predicted the evolution of the top 25 bloggers user points'. I'm sure that there are two questions that you would like to answer:

• Is Draginol going to be #1 at vitam eternam?

• When Dan's name is going to be out of the top 10? (sorry Dan, nothing personal)

Let's do the time warp again...

 As you might have guess, the graphic show the predicted evolution for the top 25. The quality of the picture is poor and it is not very clear, sorry, but that the best I could do.

The data used for building this graphic are available for download at Sir Peter's. Here

Draginol has a huge amount of point to be catched up. Fortunately, he isn't the quicker to gain points, the actual number 2 is gaining  point quicker. However, before #2 will overcome him, it will take around 700 days (yellow line cross black line at the top). So, Good luck! 

Before Dan disappear away from the top 10, we need  6 bloggers to reach his actual number of points.( Dan is the horizontal blue line). This will happen in 70 day.

Is the time machine reliable?

Yes, but it is really limited because we need to make approximations that are far away from real life. Among them, the most preeminent is that bloggers always write and interact at the same speed and that they get always the same points for that. As a personal example, I haven't been blogging for 30 days but the way it is calculated, as an overall parameter, make me look slower than actually I am. (i am still the last anyway...)

Another problem is that others blogger below than top 25 are trying to make their way up and that may change things as well.

Ultimately, I believe the system made of top 25 bloggers to be a  non linear (chaotic), so we can't really apply these kind of model. 

However, this week has seen the overcome of #2  by #3, and the time machine had predicted it. (look at day 9 in the file), even if all the predicted userpoints value were inaccurate.

In conclusion, it can show logical trend. But we aren't Vulcan, are we?

Is there a moral?

Back to Jean de la Fontaine, if cicada are currently the most successful, we can assume that JU is now in summer...

Advice to the beginners

It seems that cicada get more external points, so my advice would be: open the chatterbox, socialize and make friends. Alternatively, you can just write what you want without thinking about the precious points.

So far, there is only one certainty, no one is going to overcome Draginol quickly so don't aim for #1.

Alice in numberland

If you want to check your statistic, download the excel worksheet from Sir Peter's website. I have tried to make it self explaining, you just have to full the yellow cells with your personal data and look for the red values, the other values are not really interesting. Here

The last word

I have just been talking about strategy and game tactic, I don't think that blogging, generally or in JU particularly, is about strategy. In my modest opinion, blogging should be about the story you want to tell to yourself and other. 

Human beings will always live their lives according to stories. I think the best skill we can have is the ability to craft our own lives. To step away from the stories we're given by our culture, then do the research and create our own life story: about our past, our present and our future.

Without this skill -- story telling and writing -- we will always be forced to accept someone else's story.

Blah, blah, blah.

Chuck Palahniuk

Live talk at The Guardian(16/03/2004)

Is this article supported, sponsored or funded by Stardock?

No.

That aspect will be discussed in the conclusion, if you are not already bored, next Monday:

Points systems, blogging and ants...(3)

One flew over an ant nest

I want to give a huge thanks to Sir Peter Maxwell for his continuous support and his courtesy by hosting the excel file at http://www.sirpetermaxwell.com/JU25.xls

Thanks also to Karmagirl and Tractorman. Both made me change and hopefully improve this article.

Thanks to the top 24 bloggers for not forbidding me to use their data.

Thanks for your interest.

I do apologize for any misspelling and grammatical error. Thanks for you understanding.

Points systems, blogging and ants...

http://www.jdlf.com/lesfables/livrei/lacigaleetlafourmi

http://booktalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?128@116.hbFzawfGb2D.1@.685f1c08