A description of my blog. http://www.my-site.com 4020399739727904836 Ranking System?!?! 2007/03/#4020399739727904836 2007-03-11 I just got an email from one of the humor-blogs.com members expressing misgivings about the ranking system I've implemented on humor-blogs.com. Since he's probably not the only person with these concerns, let me take a minute to explain my rationale.

Basically the problem is this: There are so many blogs listed now that unless you are near the top of the list, you probably aren't going to get a whole lot of traffic from the site. So the question is, how do I decide what blogs to list first? So far I've been listing them in the order that they joined, but that means that some great blogs that joined later on are left to languish on the bottom. So I decided to implement something that's a little more fair, and also more helpful to people who are searching for funny blogs. That means a ranking system of some kind. I could base the rankings on votes like most blog directories do, but such a system is easy to abuse and tends to reward sites that already get a lot of traffic. So I decided to partner with a site (bloglaughs.blogspot.com) that does a fairly thorough and objective ranking of funny blogs. I'm using my recent Funny Post Contest as a backup ranking system, since most of the blogs haven't been ranked by Bloglaughs yet.

I combined this with a "referral score" because, after all, it's not really fair for me to give a bunch of publicity to a site (as great as it may be) that isn't helping out any of the other members -- for example, by burying the humor-blogs.com link at the bottom of their site somewhere.

It comes down to this: I could list the blogs in a random or arbitrary order, but that doesn't really provide any kind of service to people who come across humor-blogs.com looking for some really funny sites to check out. I don't turn down any blogs, so listing the blogs in random order would basically be like making my visitors watch American Idol tryouts for an hour. There is a reason that show has judges, which is that a lot of the people who think they can sing actually can't. I'm trying to be more Randy than Simon, but still, some feelings are going to be hurt.

Additionally, listing blogs in random order doesn't reward really talented people who put a lot of effort into writing great posts. The main reason that I started this site was to give some publicity to some great blogs written by people who maybe aren't the greatest marketers.

The system is, of course, imperfect and biased. There are still some great blogs hanging out there on the bottom rung. But overall, I think this system is more fair to the participants and more helpful to visitors. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for improving the system. I'm not making any money off this site (my Google ads have netted me $3.14 at last check!), and I don't get anything more out of it than any of the other participants. Basically I'm doing this because I feel like I'm providing a service to some great, underappreciated blogs. I'm doing this the best way I know how, and I'm always happy to hear your suggestions/criticisms/whatever.

Hope you're all having a great weekend.

Cheers,
Diesel

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