One of the comments added to that post was from Mr. Gentry, who isn’t really a fan of ours. Which is just fine — some of the best feedback comes from those who aren’t convinced of the usefulness products and services. They don’t sugar coat what they don’t like or what’s not working, and they tend to provide excellently detailed information, especially if they’re developers. This makes our devs happy, as it provides concrete issues to tackle, and fodder for in-depth discussions.

I left Mr. Gentry a comment on that post, and recently he followed up again. As his comment addresses a number of issues I’ve heard in the past, and in the interest of not hijacking Louis’ blog, I’ve responded to Mr. Gentry’s comment here. Hopefully we’ll be able to clear up misconceptions, address issues, answer questions, and provide a resource of future use to others with similar questions and problems.

As always, if you’re among those with questions or problems, give me a holler any time. (Email, Get Satisfaction, or Twitter.

DGentry wrote:

I debated whether to post this publicly. Since I started it in public, I’ve decided to continue it in public.

Not a problem there. As a side note, Mr. Gentry did contact Louis regarding whether or not to continue the comment thread, but he didn’t receive a reply (I imagine his inbox is regularly mountainous), and so decided to keep the thread all in one place. Which is fine with us — can’t share information very well with others when no one can see it.

The main reason I think PostRank is not helpful to small blogs is that in order to save on bandwidth costs the PostRank metrics are collected for just a short time, and then infrequently thereafter. If you don’t have a mass of readers who descend on a new article to comment, share, and save it almost immediately, the PostRank will remain very low until AideRSS gets around to polling it again.

Mr. Gentry is correct that we don’t collect metrics on posts indefinitely. In analysis we’ve done, there is a common pattern to most posts in terms of when engagement starts to appear after a post has been published, and for how long new engagement items can be expected to keep being added. It forms a fairly consistent curve, and since you can’t account for every pattern in how audiences will engage with a post, it requires making choices that take as many as possible scenarios into account. But alas, you never get every one.

Occasionally, as noted, a post will garner some new engagement items after analysis is no longer active, and in those cases PostRank scores will end up off by a bit (in my experience, usually less than one PostRank point). When this is reported to us, we update manually.

Interestingly, Mr. Gentry’s comments did spark an interesting internal discussion about a modified way of checking for engagement items that would take these later peaks in engagement into account. No ETA on when that might happen yet, though.

I’ll have an article get comments through the course of its first day, but AideRSS shows 0 comments until some number of days later. Its a truism with RSS: people will either read an article when it first appears in their reader, or not at all. AideRSS consistently assigns my articles a minimal PostRank for the first several days, so anyone using PostRank in their reader is more likely to skip everything I write.

This is a different issue. Occasionally our analysis spiders have gotten backed up, which has led to unfortunate delays in detecting new posts and, as Mr. Gentry noted, analyzing engagement items like comments. We do monitor this, in addition to hearing from users. I am happy to report, however, that both of these issues have been addressed recently, and folks should be seeing much improved analysis times. (Of course, if you still notice delays, please tell us so we can investigate and fix them.)

I emailed AideRSS about this, and received an acknowledgement that rate limiting is done (and thats it). AideRSS needs a ping service, not just for RSS updates but to have the bot go re-check the metrics.

Ilya’s response on this one: “Most of our metrics gathering is now done via the ‘ping’ protocol he’s described. Only comments and Google trackbacks are still in polling mode.”

A secondary problem is that the PostRank metrics, most notably comment counts, suffer occasional (and large) errors. Larger blogs with larger metrics suffer little from the noise. For a smaller blog the noise will exceed the signal: articles achieve high PostRank based not on any quality of the article, but solely on measurement inaccuracy.

Yep, comment counts occasionally go haywire, though, understandably, we have to rely a lot on our community to report those instances to us. In my reply comment to Mr. Gentry on Louis’ post, I asked him to let us know if he’s seen these inaccuracies (and for what site), but he hasn’t replied.

The example Mr. Gentry notes is certainly one way engagement metrics can be off, though for high traffic sites, it tends to be more likely that something’s been upgraded/changed on the site, so engagement counts are lower than they should be. For lower traffic blogs, I’ve seen both scenarios, i.e. that engagement metrics are skewed way high, or, as aforementioned, metrics aren’t getting picked up so they’re low. Either way, they’re usually fairly easy to fix (if reported).

For my blog, a normal article gets 0-1 comments while a popular article will get 3-4 comments. The counts tracked by AideRSS are frequently off by more than this. One older article of mine shows 102 comments. This sets the PostRank bar awfully high for subsequent posts.

Posts aren’t measured against past posts in perpetuity, so a post that got 102 comments would not skew PostRank scores low for every other post that got only a few comments forever. That would make the system kind of useless. We’ve accounted for the “digg/Slashdot effect” of one post getting an unusually high number of engagement items in our analysis since the beginning, so yes, a post that gets vastly more engagement will mean some succeeding posts, if they don’t get similar engagement, will have lower PostRank scores, which is how the system is supposed to work. But the system will also account for more subtle variations, like, as noted, 0-1 comments vs 3-4 comments. And, of course, there is also the weighting of the analysis in that not all engagement items are weighted the same (more information on that here).

I asked about it on the AideRSS uservoice site: the comment count problem was acknowledged but nothing was done about correcting my site nor was any other solution offered.

This is a concern. I presume you mean you asked on Get Satisfaction? I can’t find any unanswered issues there, nor your username as I’m familiar with it. Could you send me the link to your query or send me your username? As noted earlier, I didn’t receive a reply from you to my request for the URLs of feeds displaying skewed metrics on my comment on Louis’ blog post, either, so you’re of course welcome to send me those as well. (I know of your blog, but since many of our community members have multiple blogs, I can never be sure which is experiencing issues unless the URL is provided.)

Update: Mr. Gentry provided me with the Get Satisfaction URL for his issue, and it turns out the problem was that his issue was reported as a sub-issue of a larger one. When we solved the larger issue, I closed it, and his languished, forgotten, alone, and un-solved. Totally our fault there.

Much later, I noticed that some of the uservoice answers mentioned changes in the blog template which could improve the bot’s accuracy. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the template changes mentioned, and I’m sorry to say by that point I’d given up on AideRSS and didn’t bother to follow up.

Not sure what you mean by this one. We’ve had a few issues where community members have implemented custom-built blog templates, and in some cases that’s prevented us from detecting and analyzing metrics until some tweaks have been made on our end, their end, or both. We can analyze all the major existing “pre-fab” templates, and have made upgrades to accommodate for many “home-grown” options as well. In any case, if you’re referring to something completely different, please let me know.

I was enthused about AideRSS when I first saw Louis Gray’s article about it. I would zealously check your site every time I posted an article… and was consistently disappointed. I always tweet, save to delicious, and Google Reader share every article I post. Those counts should have always been at least 1, but AideRSS consistently showed them as zero and assigned a PostRank of 1.0. Days later, the PostRank would go to somewhere between 3.0 and 6.0 (never higher, because of that one wildly inflated post being 10.0).

I think I’ve addressed these points above. In any case, you are quite welcome to contact me any time you have questions or see something that doesn’t look right with your metrics. (I have one main developer who works with me on troubleshooting, which tends to help streamline the process of sorting these things out.) I’ve asked him to take a look at your blog’s metrics to ensure everything’s working correctly there.

As noted, though, it’s not really possible for us to have a secondary system that can detect any time anything might be off with any of the hundreds of thousands of blogs in our system, so we still rely on user feedback.

According to feedburner that one wildly inflated article has the most fetches of anything I’ve written. PostRank does have an impact. However that one inflated article isn’t the article I would want to nudge new readers towards. Unfortunately I don’t get to make that choice. PostRank does.

Certainly a post that ranks as a 10 will always be a 10, so it will show up in your post history as such, and will come up in the widget as a top post (until it’s replaced by other, newer posts of equally high rank). If a post is ranked a 10 and shouldn’t be, as noted before, it should be a relatively easy thing to fix. If it’s a genuine 10 based on a lot of metrics, only way to draw attention to other posts is to have other posts that rank equally high. Of course, if I knew the exact formula for accomplishing that, I’d probably be a lot more internet famous than I am.

However, the extension is still new and a bit untested by the masses, so it’s in the “Experimental” section. That’s where you come in!

To get the extension moved into tried-and-true general circulation, we need reviews for it. Ideally gushing, glowing, where-have-you-been-all-my-life reviews, but we’re cool with constructive criticism, too. (Hey, we don’t know how to make stuff work better for you unless you tell us…)

If you haven’t played with it yet, we have a quick video to provide you with more information on what it is and how it works (scroll down to the fourth one).

Fortunately, reviewing extensions is easy as pie (mmm… pie). Pop over to the Firefox Add-ons site and on the right side of the page you’ll see a What do you think? header, a series of ranking stars, and a textbox under that for longer reviews.

You’ll need to login to the site before leaving a review (or register if you don’t have an account yet), but once you’re logged in, the review fields will be accessible. Let the fine Mozilla folks know what you think of the extension, and voila, you’re done!

And, as always, as thanks for your feedback we’ll happily send you some snazzy schwag. (Easiest way to get that is to email me to let me know you’ve logged a review, and send me your name, size, and address.)

In addition to an overview of some of our features, I’ve tried to explain a bit about how I view PostRank — what it is and what it does in the context of real people who use it.

Since Joe knows us pretty well, I figured if he’s not clear on our rebranding, then it’s pretty likely other folks might be confused, too. (The @replies to Joe’s tweet query confirmed it.)

So I’ll try to clear up any misunderstandings about what we’re up to.

Yes, the company is still AideRSS, Inc. We have not changed to PostRank, Inc. Or AideRank, or PostRSS, or whatever some witty people may imply. One of the reasons for moving focus away from the AideRSS name is that people tended to stumble over it — misspellings, problems remembering it accurately, and it didn’t seem to clearly communicate what we do.

Our core technology, which powers all our products, is PostRank. It was before and it will be in the future. (But who knows what future innovations our geek geniuses might be cooking up in their wily little brains…)

Because PostRank is central to what we do, and, when we’re asked what AideRSS does, we’re really explaining what PostRank does, we’ve decided to focus more on PostRank, as the technology that we develop and improve, as the power and value behind our products and tools, and as our flagship brand.

Many companies have more than one product, and brands tend to be built around those products. To use another local example, lots of people know what a BlackBerry is, but outside of Waterloo, not that many people talk about RIM, the company that makes them. I’ve even been at a conference with a friend who worked for RIM, and heard plenty of folks say, “Oh, she works for BlackBerry”.

PostRank is kind of like that for us. In the future we’ll potentially have lots of products, some built on PostRank, some perhaps built on future technology we’ll develop.

Our actual products and tools (things we offer that the public can put to work for themselves) include:

• PostRank analysis (which you can do on our website, and which takes place behind all our functionality)
• filtering and ranking functionality for your feeds (which you can do on our website or with the Google Reader extension)
• the Top Posts widget (on hold briefly)
• the PostRank Firefox extension
• the Google Reader extension
• APIs that enable third party developers and partners to integrate PostRank functionality into their own applications.

In the future, engagement analysis (”Engagement rankings in the blogosphere”) will become part of our public toolkit as well, but at the moment it’s mostly just a spectator sport for you folks (and an interesting way to find new feeds to subscribe to).

So, we’re focusing on what drives our work and makes us useful (hopefully). PostRank is a focal point for our thoughts, ideas, and development so that everything we work on benefits our user community (present and future).

And no, I don’t know just yet whether that means our t-shirts will become collectors items, so don’t fire up eBay just yet…

However, for those who’ve gone looking for the widget to add it to their sites, it is not currently available. (Widgets already installed still work.) The reason for this is because the website update included a bunch of changes and improvements to how we do analysis, but including a full widget update at the same time would have required too great an increase in project scope.

So for now the widget still uses the old analysis, and widget PostRank scores don’t quite match website PostRank scores.

What’re we planning on doing about it? Glad you asked. We will be re-launching the widget. Currently ETA I’ve been given is at least a couple of weeks. We’ll be updating the analysis, and have been discussing various “refresh” features to add to it as well.

So this is a good time to get your requests in for features and functionality you’d like to see in the widget. We want it to be as useful and engaging as possible, plus we like to reward contributors with schwag.

Stay tuned! (When we re-launch the widget, we will, of course, announce it with great fanfare.)

Fear not, we’ve been informed of the widget’s issues (broken PostRank graphic, broken links back to our site), and as of a few minutes ago, a fix has been deployed.

That said, if you notice any other weird widget behaviour, do let us know.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Really, we’d like to answer, in a few scenarios, “But what can PostRank do for me?” We hear from social media and marketing folks a lot, not surprisingly, but would love to hear from folks in other domains as well. What do you do? How have you been using PostRank functionality? What challenges do you wish you could solve (and hope PostRank can help)?

So what are your requests? What topics, industries, job functions, or interests would you like to apply PostRank to to save time and increase your productivity? We’re all ears!

Can’t promise to be able to match the creative genius of Common Craft, but I’ll do my best.

After a brief delay from our intended launch time, the new postrank.com is live and in the wild!

We’ve been really excited by the feedback so far. A lot of what we developed came from direct user requests, so we hope it really helpful.

There’s been a lot of discussion already over various feedback, including questions, opinions on how things work now, and suggestions. That’s exactly what we want — we can’t make the site great without knowing what works for our community. Keep it coming! (Comment here, email me, tweet, or hit Get Satisfaction.)

There are also, unsurprisingly, a few bugs we’ve turned up:

• A couple of people have reported issues with logging in/resetting passwords on the new site. If that happens, just let us know and we’ll fix it up.
• There were some problems with lots of PR 1.0 rankings in Google Reader. We’re working on that, too.
• And there was also a really poorly coincidental hardware failure on EC2, so there are some rankings that are a bit behind as we move things over and get them ramped back up. Should be done today, though.

Anything else quirky or weird that you see, let us know.

We’ve also done some renovations and consolidated our websites to make finding out anything and everything about PostRank, engagement, and our company more accessible.

So what’s new?

• Customize feed subscriptions to filter feeds by PostRank and keywords so you can track exactly the topics you want.
• Tag subscriptions to create channels of feeds on similar topics.
• Bulk manage your feed subscriptions.
• Streamline importing and exporting for OPML files or individual feeds.
• Engagement analysis in action — a discovery engine for finding great new sites.
• A new PostRank Firefox extension that enables you to view PostRanks for articles you’re currently reading, create and manage synchronized feed subscriptions from anywhere on the web, and view a site’s Top Posts at a glance.

We’ve also consolidated links to everything you might want to know about us in a new footer — account information, learning about PostRank, resources for developers, how to get help, details about the company — it’s all there, just scroll down.

You may also notice some changes to the appearance and branding of the site. Because PostRank is at the core of what we do, we’ve made it a more prominent part of who we are. But don’t worry, if anything the snazzy new look will only make our efforts to help you become an information overlord even more awesome.

To learn more, we’ve created screencasts to introduce postrank.com’s great new features. Just head over to our Getting Started page for a visual tour of how to create and manage customized subscriptions, feed management, custom content channels, and the new PostRank Firefox extension.

Many thanks to all our beta testers for their invaluable feedback. And supersize kudos to our team for their snazzy ideas and long hours of chocolate-fueled hard work. Great success!

And, of course, we’d love to know what you think. Questions, comments, future feature requests — bring it on! Feel free to leave a comment, send me an email, drop by our Get Satisfaction page, or tweet at me. Cheers!

Stay tuned!