Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

I've been thinking about this for the past week or so, but currently have no time to do anything about it ... so here it is:  create an app that consumes the most popular link blogs (I was thinking of the microsoft oriented ones) and every day publish the links that are in common or at least rank them by how many of those link blogs have linked to a specific entry (will need at least 48 hours give-or-take between all the link blogs publishing dates... not sure how to handle that - maybe like a stock market ticker updates numbers ...) .

I was thinking of the following:

  • a list of the day(s) most linked to entries
  • a list of entries that are unique (not in common) - might be some diamonds in the rough

If anyone builds this thing (let me know), I think it could be a link blog killer ... which of course would defeat the source of info - but it would be a useful way to get the most popular entries instead of subscribing to 10 link blogs or so.

posted on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 5:35 PM

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# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

Technorati?
8/20/2008 5:46 PM | Wesner Moise

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

I...LIKE IT!!! A low-tech approach would be to RSS a select list of .NET link blogs (starting with Interesting Finds, of course!), then stripping out the urls and calculating matches. You could probably do this in about 2 hours. Since you walk to work you should think about it!

Keep me posted on any fruition of this great J.H. idea.
8/20/2008 6:00 PM | Dave Burke

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

Guys, thanks for the comments.

Wesner: sure there is Technorati, but that seems more like digg to me. Entries bubble off the top, not really a day to day view is it? I don't use it so I'm really not sure.

Dave: I wish ... to much to do in the next month.
8/20/2008 6:19 PM | Jason Haley

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

Kinda unrelated, but I like your new format with the summaries. I know you said that it's sort of divided 50/50 whether people like it or hate it, so I had an idea.

What if you had sort of your top 5 or 10 links with summaries, and then the rest of your interesting links with no summaries. It would basically be a hybdrid of both formats. I wonder if people would like that better.
8/21/2008 4:49 PM | Haacked

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

Phil: Interesting idea, it might come to something like that.
8/21/2008 6:21 PM | Jason Haley

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

As a faithful, daily reader of Interesting Finds, I think Phil has a great idea. I like the Final Cut, but am so used to skimming through your links. Reading an expanded Top Five links of the day would be both economic and interesting.
8/23/2008 6:50 PM | Dave Burke

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

Thinking loudly....

You could also provide *both* Final and Rough versions using a stylesheet to determine which is displayed.

Wouldn't help your feed subscribers (like me) though. In that case you could offer two feeds. May or may not be difficult depending on your blog software - you may be able to abuse the partial/full feed options that some blog systems provide.

BTW I'm trying to find time to implement your link blog aggregator idea!
8/24/2008 3:13 PM | MattyT

# re: Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

I actually started on something like this a few months back... my aggregator app would check all of my RSS feeds (which include regular blogs, link blogs, link sites such as DotNetKicks, etc.) for entries from the past week or so and come up with the top links. I would then manually sift through the top links and choose the ones I find interesting for my weekly link post.

The app had logic to count a link only once from any single blog, so that a single blogger doesn't influence the result too much. Another thing it did was to count the comments in the blog entry and give more weight to entries with more comments. This is with the thinking that a heavily commented post is usually more interesting in some ways (controversial posts included).

An idea I had but didn't implement was to search blogsearch.google.com/technorati.com for new blog entries within the past week or so (advanced search?). For the top x entries, get the incoming links (I am sure this is something you can do with Google... perhaps Technorati as well). New posts matching my topic keywords with lots of incoming links are candidates.

I think it's a very doable idea if more time is put into it. I found other things more interesting to work on and basically forgot about my app a few months ago... until now your post reminds me of it.
8/28/2008 4:32 PM | Chinh Do

# hushchamber.com

hushchamber.com
10/15/2008 7:20 AM | theQueue

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