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/