Bottom line is, if people have their filtering thresholds set relatively high, some posts will never appear, no matter how long they’re out in the wild, if those posts don’t receive a certain amount of engagement. Everyone needs to find a filtering level they feel comfortable with in terms of feeling like they’re getting all the news and info they want, but aren’t wasting their time reading the same stuff over and over or reading stuff that doesn’t interest them.

For those who read their feeds early or quite often, our value is limited because it takes time for PostRank scores to develop to accuracy. Same for people who can’t bring themselves to trust filtering. Some people simply need to do the filtering inside their own heads, which is totally fine. We’re not the service for them.

Ranking content by something like reading level isn’t something I can ever see us doing. Software that can gauge that certainly exists and is becoming more sophisticated, but I can’t see that ever becoming more than a niche request, since with the way the system works now, anyone can use it regardless of their interests or reading level. That and it doesn’t tend to take long to determine whether a site is written in a style you like or that you find annoying.

Events like long comment threads (which, as you note, are not uncommonly flame wars), are something we weight for — as are any sort of engagement activity that’s unusual compared to the site’s history. In this way we ensure that the site’s content’s PostRanks aren’t completely skewed by one post getting a couple thousand diggs, or what have you.

Melanie Bakers last blog post..PostRank saturation in Google search results up 500%!

So if one’s new posts come in at below the threshhold and people use AideRSS as their main blog reader, how will subscribers ever see new posts? Twitter???

Tags are better than folders. As long as you can dynamically rss based on the selector it is fine.

Actually, a small correction regarding recency — it actually works in reverse — new posts get low rankings that increase over time. This is because our scores are based on engagement, and it takes a while for people to read and react to posts. So posts don’t tend to have many diggs, bookmarks, tweets, comments, etc. when they’re new because people haven’t seen them yet. Once people start responding to a post, the PostRank score goes up.

We’re currently working on a big upgrade to the site, so stay tuned for that. We’ve no plans to add folders, per se, but we do like the Google Reader model of allowing tags, which is a bit more flexible.

Melanie Bakers last blog post..PostRank saturation in Google search results up 500%!