Plus, it’s awesome when people are interested enough to stick with asking until they get it. Greatly appreciated! (Totally ping me with your shirt size and address if you’re interested in some schwag — melanie at aiderss dot com.)

No matter, it makes sense to me now and thank you again for hanging in there with me. I’m glad to hear there will be a widget coming, I could see a lot of use for that.

Thanks again.

If the filter level is “All”, you will see the posts as soon as we have them, no matter what the PostRank. If the filter level is “Best”, you won’t see posts until they achieve high enough PostRank scores. So for high volume feeds or low traffic feeds, it’s quite likely you won’t see a fair bit of their content unless EVERYTHING gets crazy high engagement (which is the whole point, really).

Hence why determining filtering level is a matter of asking yourself how much you care about what someone has to say. If you’re a huge fan, it’ll probably be “All”, regardless of topic or engagement or PostRank score. If you just want to have a general idea of what’s hot, then “Best” will do it for you. And of course there are the other levels of moderation in between.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean about carrying the rank along or not. It is correct that we use each post’s PostRank score to determine whether or not a post shows up when people use filtering levels. We also use the PostRank score to determine what shows up in the Top Posts widget (to be re-released soon!)

Where filtering isn’t being actively performed, though (like viewing “All”), the PostRank score is just a visual representation of engagement (or how interesting the blogger’s audience thought the post was), but isn’t being used to affect where or how the post appears.

So the posts and their attached metrics “live” on your site in some sort of database. That I understand.

So what happens if I mix together a set of feeds to create a new feed, and say I want just the “best” posts. So a blog author in one of the feeds posts an article on Monday afternoon. I’m assuming then based on your comments, that the article would only get pushed out into my new, mixed feed, if and when the article got sufficient engagement to become ranked as “best”. If I had selected “all”, then it would be pushed out as soon as you got it. Do I have it now?

I guess what was throwing me as in my mind I was carrying the rank along with the post through my mashup on to it’s ultimate destination, and I was wondering what would then happen as a post went through the stages of “good”, “better”, and “best”. But the rankings don’t follow through. You just use them to decide when to send the post to me based on the level I want to see. Correct?

Sorry to be so dense on this one. Not sure what got in my way. Thank you for your patience in guiding me through.

How often the spiders check for metrics depends on how many subscribers a blog/site has. Within the space of a week, say, a post could be checked a couple dozen times or a couple hundred times. (Can’t get into the technical specifics.)

We add new posts to our system because they have been published. We don’t add them based on whether or not they have any engagement metrics yet. Brand new posts will temporarily have PostRank scores of 1.0 and if you mouse over the score, the metrics pop-up will say “No Data”. When you return later, though, engagement metrics will have started to be gathered, so the PostRank score will go up as engagement is added, and those engagement items will appear in the pop-up.

ALL posts will enter our system with PostRank scores of 1.0, but a post that gets a lot of engagement will end up as a 10 whether the metrics pour in in a single afternoon or trickle in over a week because rankings are based on the whole blog’s past performance.

Of course, it is possible that a post doesn’t get any engagement, so no matter how many times the spiders check, the PostRank score for that post would remain 1.0.)

So how many times does any one post have it’s engagement metrics spidered? If it’s just once, then how do you guard against finding the post too soon before engagement kicks in, and if it’s multiple times, then how do you handle getting the updated ranking pushed through to end consumers?

Does that make sense?

In other words, if the spiders get to new posts “within a few hours at most”, and engagement metrics START within four hours (requoting your comments), it just feels like the metrics are computed maybe earlier than they should be, and perhaps at a lower level? And once the metric is computed it never changes? I hear what you are saying about most posts interest level dying off within a day, but then again, it’s the most interesting high value posts that generate engagement the longest. It doesn’t sound like there is any mechanism for those posts to rise to the top without re-spidering and re-posting old content.

I don’t mean to take us down a rabbit hole here, but I like the concept of your service and I’m trying to understand it better to know how to potentially use it.

Ahh, gotcha. Nope, we don’t delay displaying a post to give the engagement metrics time to ramp up.

We display posts as soon as we can after they’re published. How soon our spiders get to them depends on a few factors, but typically it’s within a few hours at most. (If the delay starts to creep up, the devs start investigating.)

The spiders have two jobs: check feeds in our system for new posts, and check posts in feeds in our system for new engagement metrics. The former takes precedence over the latter. But, as I mentioned before, engagement metrics typically start showing up within a few hours, too, so the spiders are always pretty busy.

Does that make more sense? If not, give me a holler and I’m sure we’ll hash it out eventually.

Thanks for the reply. I’m still a little bit confused on your technology and I probably didn’t word my original question very well.

So from your vantage point, engagement (and therefore post-ranking) starts very soon after the post goes live and settles lets say in a day. So if I’m using your postrank technology to filter a number of feeds, when does a particular post show up in my postranked feed?

It’s a more confusing question than it probably needs to be, but what I’m trying to ask is what the timing looks like. If I have a feed filtered through postrank and a post goes live – do you all delay the post going through your filter to let engagement “settle in” as you say?

I hope you get what I’m trying to ask as I’m very interested in this aspect. Thanks in advance.

Tagging is one of the new features we introduced with the launch of the new postrank.com site, as well as (key)word filtering, channels, and other features.

With regards to how long it takes for PostRank scores to “settle”, there’s a pretty standard engagement curve. Within about four hours after a post is published we start to see the significant engagement — new comments, bookmarks, diggs, etc. After that, things tend to trickle in for a few days, and taper off for the most part within about five days. As new metrics trickle in, the PostRank scores go up.

Certainly from time to time a post will get some new fame months after it was posted, and will generate new engagement metrics, and we’re discussing some ways we can improve recording of those new metrics as they appear after the initial round of “love”.