NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- PubSub.com, the essential prospective search tool for tracking what people are saying about the topics they care about, today announced the formal release of PubSub LinkRanks, the Blogosphere's most comprehensive tool for tracking the popularity and influence of blogs and websites. This unique service provides detailed data that bloggers and feed publishers can use to actively monitor the results of their publishing efforts, and gain insight into how to improve their future rank and influence.
PubSub LinkRanks measures the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in the more than 16 million web feeds monitored by PubSub. PubSub has also made available the PubSub LinkRanks 1000, a list of the most consistently influential sites that publish feeds, based on their average LinkRank scores during the past 30 days.
"Unlike other ranking systems, PubSub LinkRanks does more than just show you which sites are influential today, we also show which sites have had influence over the last 15 and 30 days. This multi-period ranking approach is something quite new and we're very pleased with the insight it provides," said Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub Concepts, Inc. "PubSub LinkRanks is an essential tool for people looking for an accurate way to measure how well their messages are propagating over time, or for companies looking to keep a pulse on their standing in the market."
Unlike other ranking providers, PubSub gives bloggers access to virtually all of the raw data used to compute PubSub LinkRanks. PubSub provides the data as an Atom feed, as XML-based structured blogging elements and in tabular and graphical format.
One exciting use of PubSub LinkRanks can be seen in PubSub's recently launched "Fashionable Blogs" list which shows the daily ebb and flow of influence and popularity among fashion bloggers. In the future, PubSub will partner with a variety of domain experts to provide other such focused ranked lists of specialty blogs.
"Fashionable Blogs" is available at http://www.pubsub.com/features/fashion/
How LinkRanks Works:
PubSub monitors over 16 million web feeds daily. Each day's LinkRanks are based on a careful algorithmic analysis of the 16 million links that are found in those feeds on an average day. Individual links are given different values based on the LinkRank of their source, the age of the links, and the number of links created by any one site on a day. Once all the sites that are linked to on a given day have been ranked in numerical order, they are also divided into percentages. Thus, it is easy to see if a site is in the "Top 1%" or in the "Top 75%". PubSub users can use these percentages to tune their subscriptions, and to filter out results from sites whose LinkRank is below a certain threshold. You can, for instance, ask to be notified of blogs that mention some keyword -- but only if the LinkRank for each blog is in the "Top 5%".
Not all sites will have a LinkRank. If a site hasn't published in the last 30 days or its feed isn't read by PubSub, it won't be considered during the LinkRank calculation.
"In the exceptionally dynamic world of blogging, it doesn't make sense to have rankings that are only updated weekly, monthly, or yearly," said Wyman. "Bloggers want to know who has the popular voice right now -- not last month. This is why we've decided to provide fresh daily, 15-day, and 30-day LinkRanks. Finally, we've got a ranking system that is as dynamic as the system that it ranks!"
LinkRanks is available at http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php
About the PubSub.com Service:
PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 16 million blogs and syndicated Web sites, over 50,000 newsgroups, all SEC Edgar Filings, press releases from major wire services, earthquake data from the US Geological Survey, and FAA airport delay information to instantly alert users whenever material events occur. PubSub's prospective search provides a real-time notification service made possible by PubSub's proprietary "matching engine" which, each day, performs hundreds of billions of matches between subscriber requests and newly-published items.
About PubSub Concepts, Inc.
PubSub Concepts, Inc. is a New York-based company founded in 2002. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. Visit http://www.pubsub.com for more information.