The Picks Tumbler
Okay, opportunity for discussion has been out long enough and I have appreciated all your comments, suggestions and opinions.
It seems that keeping it simple for members is the order of the day, which is great! However, if you have seen the myriad of comments and feedback that I have received over the years regarding Blotanical then you would understand that the solution is far from simple. So, let me summarise some of the main feedback points that members have provided and a few items that also need to be considered;
- Bloggers should earn more points (or at least some points for their posts)
- Pickers should earn less points (or no points for Picking - to reduce gaming and encourage reading instead)
- We need to encourage more readers to our blogs hence the reason most of you joined Blotanical
- Blotanical needs to remain small so that our blogs get better publicity
- Blotanical needs to get bigger so that our blogs get better publicity
- Points should not matter - people should just read our blogs
- Picks don't reflect good posts - just favourite bloggers
- It's getting too hard to find blogs
I trust you're getting the point!
The rationale for Picks is to elevate posts that are worthy of further promotion. If you write a good post it shoudn't matter how many friends you have, who you're linked to, what your blog design is like or whether your from Austin - Texas, Sydney or Kamchatka. If it's a good post it should lauded as such.
Trying to create that simply while barracading gamers, popular friends, ya-da ya-da is quite a daunting task so while many of the suggestions have been good ones - and some I have taken on board - many are written in isolation of the multiple factors at play on this issue.
So, what is in store for Picks?
- Picking Hearts The current version of Picks offers one solitary button. If you click it it gives a Pick point to the post. If you don't it doesn't. The updated version will offer 5 hearts allowing you to pick anywhere between 1 and 5 (5 = great; 1=not-so-great). It doesn't take any more time to Pick and is still a simple solution
- Points Appropriation For each heart that the blogger receives for their post they will gain 1 point (ie 5 stars = 5 points, 4 stars = 4 points and so on). Pickers will now only receive 2 points for picking a post regardless of how they rank that post.
- Post Condensing
In order to increase the speed at which posts display in Blotanical a major change will take place. While most RSS readers (ie Google Reader, Bloglines etc) have been praised for their speed over Blotanical's Picks they also haven't been offering the download of each blog as it displays. Instead they strip the .xml content and parse that only. From now on Blotanical will be adopting this practice as well. You can still click a link to view how the post will be showing normally but this method allows the content to be delivered far quicker and doesn't lose time downloading the blogger's sidebars, large graphic header or (heaven-forbid!) any unrequested audio links.
Blotanical will also include some advertising into these posts in order to try and generate some revenue to continue the site. And, according to the last survey we took this was your most preferred method of Blotanical sourcing some funds.
In fact, 80% of respondents were happy with us to continue in this vein. For those who may not like this method we will be offering paid memberships in future where those who take it up will enjoy an ad-free Blotanical.
- Popular Posts Ranking
The true beauty of this update is the ranking algorithm for the Popular Posts page. Up until now it has always been based on the NUMBER of Picks a post has received in a specific time period. From now on it will be measured on the quality of those Picks and ranked via a weighted average. The algorithm that runs this will not be disclosed but it's fair to say that just because you're currently popular on Blotanical doesn't mean your posts are always going to hit this list.In fact, the chances of normally missed blogs will increase and the list will be comprised of more than just a handful of certain blogs. The hope is that this doesn't discriminate against those blogs but that it just makes it a more level playing field.
Hopefully these changes will make the Picks feature a better place to enjoy your favourite reads.
SIDENOTE: A possible future feature is offering non-bloggers the option to write their own posts in a generic blog platform and have them listed with other blog posts.