Is ''Tail'' a Metric of Blogpost Quality?

In my previous post " Birthing the Ultimate Feed Reader" I mentioned the “river” versus “folder” RSS discussion in the Scobleizer blog and wrote, "what something is worth depends on how much of it there is and how fast it's moving". In what I do I'm challenged to manage whole families of technical documents (herding cats, yes?) while attending to minute details, even while things are in flux (hence "nailing jello to the wall"). So finding axes of differentiation / categorization (semantic web anyone?) is something I worked on before WWW came into being.

So the notion of a quality metric that manifests as ?what? longevity ... seems to me that has face validity. TailRank.com operates on such a supposition: that the number of branches springing from a post represents some quality. I'll buy that.

I just spliced some TailRank output into my frankenstein homepage (see the link above) ... turns out to be good reading!

From my list of something over 200 blogs I've requested that TailRank filters out those that have more than 25 ?what? spawned threads. Koolio. Really.

This just in: "IT Gets Drafted to Babysit the Blogs, by David L. Margulius at InfoWorld.

"I don't have time to read Weblogs. There, I said it. I'm not saying the blogosphere's emperor has no clothes. I'm just trying to be realistic about how much time I can spend in life reading other people's musings. According to the latest Jupiter Research study, however, I may be bucking an unstoppable trend.
Nearly 70 percent of all large companies will have deployed a Weblog authoring system by the end of this year [...]
The immediate upshot, says Jupiter, is that IT needs to "figure out how to leverage existing Web content management best practices and functionality [...]" These best practices include workflow, single-source content repositories, security and permissions, and content auditing and analytics.
But on another level, I wonder whether there's a bigger picture that IT should be thinking about."

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I'm obviously going to have to add to this item ... I just stopped by ''Gopher still going strong'' on Kottke.org to post this comment:

"Gopher still hot? Dang right! I'm still getting hits in my blog from this post. Can we say that it (gopher) is paradigmatic of "long tail"?

K ... what's going on here? I know a) I get fed up with just how bloated FF is and b) it's sometimes a perk to use telnet and/or pine. Maybe some of us really appreciate sleek / parsimonious?

p.s. Thinking about the interface I'm cobbling together for my "Participatory Deliberation" is where sleek/parsimonious came up. When I slip into that mode I see Web2.0 as spring-loaded and self-evident. A series/collection/suite of single-page apps?"

X-posted to Togo at LiveJournal

You know about WWW-browsers (obviously), and you very likely know about FTP ... and maybe about IRC, too.

Do you know about "gopher"? Gopher pre-dates WWW, like IRC and newsgroups (NNTP), and email ... it was a way of allowing folk to access other people's files, kinda like a web browser, but it didn't rely on HTML pages.

Here's a blast from the past that's still appropriate today: " A Practical Guide to Defeating The Radical Right" and "Directory: Cyberpunk and Postmodern Culture"

Some of the documents in there date back to 1994 ... around the time I started publishing web pages.

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Web Services Knowledge Portal

 posted Sunday, July 16, 2006 at 2:11 pm MST

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Web Services Knowledge Portal is a sister site of the XML and related technologies portall. 

MathDL | The Linear Algebra Behind Search Engines ... yessiree there are some fine documents to be had!

"The Information Age has flooded readers with information. However, these gains in the amount of information available are useless without parallel gains in techniques for effectively storing and searching through such information. Consider the following facts:

In 2001, there were about 250,000 periodicals published in print worldwide, with roughly 12,000 added each year (Ulrich's Directory, 2001).

In 2000, there were nearly 3.5 million books in print (Books in Print, 2001).

The number of books in top libraries doubles every 14 years (Wurman, 1989).

In 2000, there were about 2.5 billion web pages on the Internet, with a growth rate of 7.3 million per day (Lyman & Varian, 2000).

"

(Regretable that the stats are not fresh.)

Topic Driven Access to Scientific Handbooks (PDF version) ... dandy PhD thesis.

More on this theme in my gnodal.livejournal.com

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