The first public page of BlogsNow Version 2
The link above will go to a preview page of BlogsNow Version2. It is just the latest links. BlogsNow Version2 became a complete rewrite. None of the old code or data has been used. Just the experience.
BlogSpam is one of the biggest issues for a Meme Tracker like BlogsNow. Rigth now it looks as if 25% of all active blogs are spam. Created by programs, not people. Created to make a quick bug for somebody somewhere.
It was an interesting mental excercise to spend so much coding time on this subject. My spontanous reaction to ‘spam’ is that I really hate it. I hate the concept to create huge damages for many people just so that very few have a little financial gain. But being furious is not a good mental state to write code in. At least not for me. So I had to get over it, and just
turn it off. It looks as if it works right now.
Since spam filtering works I could include blogspot.com hosted blogs in BlogsNow Version 2 again. Which is nice,
since there are jsut so many blogs on there. It was a sad day when I was forced to turn the crawl off for it in Version 1.
blogsnow V1 was fast. BlogsNow Version2 is even faster. It runs circles around Version1: An analysis of last 50,000 links
added to the blogosphere (covering something like 5-10 hours right now) takes about 30 seconds. Version1 is busy for about five minutes on the same task.
The Preview page gets a fresh data set every three minutes. Since it can 😉 The Ranking is a mix of number of links and time since the link has been added: Links added right now have full weight, while the last one has no weight. I think I will be playing with the exact recipe for a little bit.
The Preview page has no features. Of course there will be pages with who links to what, etc. I am somewhat undecided on RSS. Version1 had no RSS half it’s life. People got all excited when I added it, but I did not see the use spread or be particularly interesting. I think that many people just ‘collect’ RSS feeds like they do bookmarks. But they actually never go back, since they are busy chasing the next butterfly. So I might as well skip RSS. Except for movies and mp3. Media Enclosures make sense. And yes, BlogsNow will have those lists as well.
Let me know what you think about this little glimpse on the future of BlogsNow Version2.