Daypop Top 40
I guess I might as well provide a link to it here.
When I first started working on Daypop, a Top 40 page was part of the plan -- a complement to the search engine. Instead of just putting something together quickly early on, I was waiting until the data structures stopped changing before computing popular links. I wasn't in any hurry.
Then, of course, Blogdex came out and I scrapped the Top 40 page. I launched Daypop without it.
But my friends who had heard about the Top 40 idea still wanted it. "Wouldn't it be redundant?" I thought. "Well, I guess my ranking algorithm will most likely differ from Blogdex." I knew it would only take a couple hours to put together, most of it creating the HTML, so I put up the page last week and told my friends about it.
I've been using it a lot this past week. Now, I've decided I might as well open it up to the world. The current ranking function has not been extensively tested (I just changed it right now) so who knows what'll happen in the next few days.
What are other webloggers talking about? The Daypop Top 40 is a list of the links that are popular in the weblogging community.
This is not meant as a replacement for Blogdex. Blogdex ranks all links. It's got an All-Time links section. It has a more comprehensive feature set. I only post the Top 40 links that are timely and I use a different ranking function.
The way links are ranked, they have a tendency to shoot to the top if they are popular and just as quickly, they can fall from grace. If a story breaks and the interest is not immediate, if it takes time to build, then the link is less likely to reach the top. I might still mess with the ranking function in the future.
How to read the bar graph:
The "EQ" looking bar under every link displays the relative score of each link. There is a lot of information that you can get from the bar. The 
is the current score. The farther to the right it is, the higher the score. Any bright green in the bar denotes the increase in score from the last update. Any light red in the bar denotes a decrease in score from the last update. Right now, the list is updated every six hours. The light, light gray shows the maximum score that the link has reached.
The is also a Citations link. Click on this to see all the weblogs that cited the link.
Once again, here's the Daypop Top 40. Hope it comes in handy!
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Comments disabled.
awesome stuff
By having competition in the weblog indexing world, we're expanding the gene pool. By relying on too few ranking functions we stand to miss out on interesting content.
Great stuff. I'd like to syndicate your top40 list as an RSS feed. Do you have any problems with that?
Thanks
- Paul
RSS
The only problem I can see with this is if several (or more) people use the RSS feed on their weblogs, resulting in a feedback loop. Is there a way to fix this? Is there a way for me to tell that the link came from a syndicated feed?
rss feed
i've got an RSS feed for daypop top 40 at
http://myhome.mystuff.net/myweblog/daypop.cgi
it's a minimal feed, as rss should be.
let me know what you think. i'd like to register this with the my.userland.com aggregator.
-paul
Very Cool!
How do you strip the titles and the links? Do you specify the page structure manually or is there software that just "figures it out" by following some rules?
rss feed
Since your page is very "regular," it's not hard to use perl regular expressions to pickapart all of the elements. getting a title and link are very easy.
it'd actually be even better if you generated this on your side. no need to scrape the html. what do you think?
-paul
top.rss
I'm generating a top.rss now. Is there a need for the <image> section?
top.rss
looks great!
check out a rendering of the feed at
http://piefke.helma.at/rss/
don't worry about the image.
you can register the feed at
http://aggregator.userland.com
One Question
Are most RSS feeds displayed using ? If this is the case, then redirection is not necessary to avoid feedback since I don't follow and interpret includes. Otherwise, it would be pretty easy for me to change the links in the RSS to point to a corresponding Daypop redirection URL.
