No worries, it’s pretty hard for me to take offense, and really, I LOVE when people pick PostRank apart. It’s from those folks that you often learn the most useful ways to improve what you’re doing.

I hadn’t seen the research project; thanks for the link. It’s a funny balance — we want the credibility that comes with “just the facts” — measurement by algorithm. But at the same time we want the nuance and recommendations that come from social connection, which is purely human. (Though, of course, the folks who create the algorithms are human, too…)

And, of course, the same people who want to have the control over how we weight/measure things are usually the first ones to holler about compromised credibility of results, ironically. :)

There need to be system in place to balance out the bias that’s being created by popularity systems. Glad to hear you’re working on it, I’ll give the discovery functionality a go.

- gather as many engagement sources as possible to capture as many expressions of interest as possible
- gather engagement metrics over time to capture stories’ real interest arc (some stories get all the attention immediately, others trickle in over time)
- account for the human aspect – the individual interests and random finds.

We’ve had a lot of feedback about needing to account for that third item, which was the big catalyst behind the Discovery functionality we just launched.

I.e. it’s about what YOU find interesting and what YOU read and making it easy to share that with others. Especially since there’s way too much info online for any one person to keep on top of.

Cuz if I’ve learned one thing from perusing the feeds in our system, it’s that there are communities online around EVERYTHING, so there’s always someone else into what you’re into.

1. Only you can really say how interested you are, your actions and behaviour aren’t always affected by interesting information, so research as you suggest (Mark) is probably required.
2. Interesting is relative so what’s interesting to you may not be interesting to others, so you would want a metric based on your personal interests (Lee, you’ll be laughing as we’ve talked about this endlessly)
3. Interesting information may take time to process and absorb before it’s acted upon. Unfortunately because we have created, and are moving further towards a real-time web where information is tailored to being acted upon immediately, this problem will probably get worse before it gets better.