PubSub Community Lists
November 7th, 2005
Many colleagues ask what I do at PubSub and most of the time I can’t answer, because most of the work I do has to stay private until it’s…well…public. Today is one of my favorite and most stressful days, because we’re releasing a new service.
Introducing Community Lists, human collected lists of blogs with PubSub’s linkranking system used to rank them. The concept is actually a simple one. We’ve received calls and e-mails from all over asking about blogosphere influencers in many fields of study and profession and didn’t have a decent place to point them to. So, being the forward thinking company that we try to be, we created that place. The lists change daily and shows a view of the blogosphere that you haven’t seen before: A daily ranking of “influencers” for the previous day (linkranks runs once a day) for specific community. You will also be able to see the highest gainers for that day.
We’ve enlisted editors for two of the 4 lists that are currently live on the site. The third list (librarians) is edited by me, and the fashion list needs an editor (so, if you know of any fashion bloggers who might be interested, send them a note to contact me). These editors know their blog field very well, and will be able to keep up with the lists (adding and deleting as needed) better than anyone at the PubSub office could. Also, since the lists are community oriented, we looked outside of the company for editors.
Take a look around and let us know what you think (send e-mail to feedback@pubsub.com) or contact us if you have any ideas for more lists. For now, I’d like to introduce the four inaugural lists.
1) The PR List, maintained by Constantin Basturea, one the leaders in online PR community.
2) The Law List, maintained by Kevin O’Keefe, president and founder of LexBlog.
3) The Librarian List, maintained by me.
4) The Fashion List, which needs an editor and actually stemmed from the NYT article on fashion blogs that appeared a few months ago.
Update - Michael Arrington reviewed the community lists and Robert Scoble had his own comments as well.
+ Michael Arrington - “This is a great example of Reading Lists - edited, dynamic opml feed lists.”
+ Robert Scoble - “We need far more granular lists. Hey, how about letting me track the people on MY OPML lists? I have 1,400 people I subscribed to. Why can’t I see which ones are moving up the list or down the list?”
+ Tara Calashain - “This couldn’t and shouldn’t be a one-stop shop when you’re trying to develop a data pool to monitor, but these lists, with their rankings and their statistics, make it really easy to generate a list of blogs from which to start.”
I’ll publish more comments as they come in.