Picks Update

But, that's not all. Take a look at these new features:

- Tabbed Lists: now you can create your own lists based on keywords that bloggers, and Blotanists, have used to define certain blogs. If you don't want them in the list then take them out - it's your call - and you can create as many of these lists as you wish.

- Error-Free lists: these new lists will only display posts that are working. It means that your votes will always be scored correctly with no random posts turning up as one of your posts.

- Improved Data:you will now be able to view a few more helpful metrics that should assist you in your journey to improving your blog and increasing your audience.

These aren't the only changes but they should give a taste of how Picks will be improving.

Plot Update

As these two features begin to take shape we will reveal them to the Gurus for beta testing and the remainder of the site update should be completed within another few weeks after that process is complete.

Thanks for staying patient and I look forward to showing you more.

Therefore, as part of this ongoing update (the process is continuing behind the scenes) this area will continue to have errors up until we launch the new upgraded Picks.

I can tell you now that the new Picks we have been working on is far superior to what we have lived with since the start of Blotanical. It produces fewer errors (and the ones that do get produced can be rectified very quickly), is faster, easier to navigate and allows you to keep abreast of updated posts in a way that you haven't been able to on Blotanical before.

Plus, your options for which lists of posts that you view will be greatly expanded and even allow the creation of lists by tags - something many of you have requested over the years.

Alas, I can't give you a ETA on this but I can promise you that it is a priority and will be rolled out as soon as it is ready. All I ask is that you bear with me in the meantime and understand that the errors that are being produced WON'T be remedied until the upgrade is released.

However, once we get back there will be some changes with many of those features I've been talking about rolling out quite quickly.

If you want to keep up with our whereabouts and schedule you can visit our blog at AussieRoadTrip.com. Please keep in touch as we won't be too far away.

As discussed through recent posts, the Picks feature has been undergoing a major update. The primary reason for the update was to make the system a little more fair for all blogs rather than just the ones who received the most Picks due their popularity status.

The feature has gone through a rigorous algorithmic change to better detect which posts are garnering better quality Picks. This algorithm will be a constant work in progress adding more variables as it aims to keep the list dynamic and fresh and being a level playing field for every blog.

Why are the number of Picks shown?
Obviously the number of Picks is one variable used in the algorithm so it's worthwhile to display. However, as explained, it's not the only variable. The number of Picks really has little bearing on where the Post displays on the list but it does quantify how the Post is going.

If you have any questions on this, please leave a comment below.

What constitutes a good post? It's so subjective. It may be a simple photograph that pierces your heart. It might be an anecdote that made you laugh because you've been there-we gardeners can chuckle over our inclination to rescue plants, to go crazy with new plants at this time of year, to laugh over battles. My column readers can now recite "Just say NO to goutweed" when I give a talk!

As I've been trying to state in my posts, Blotanical is not the judiciary on whether a blog is writing good posts or not. It's merely trying to get everything else (ie Popularity, blog design, who you know (or don't)) out of the way so that bloggers can have a better chance of success based on one thing - how good the post is. Let's go back to the primary aim of Picks.

PICKS AIMS TO SORT POSTS SO THAT THOSE WHO HAVE SOMETHING OF VALUE TO SHARE WITH THE GARDENING BLOGOSPHERE ARE GIVEN THE CREDIT THEY DESERVE.

How are they given value? By you, the Picker.

The new Pick system should help us sift the cream from the ..... (lol). The idea is that we can all be on the same page when we decide how to value a post. That value is based on how you were affected by that post. Here's the legend and then an explanation of each;

1. An enjoyable post - This Pick says thank you for your post and I enjoyed reading, viewing the pics etc.
2. A very helpful post - If you found this post helpful and/or taught you something you didn't know or perhaps added something to your gardening knowledge then it should be worth an extra vote.
3. I'd comment on this post - When a post is likely to evoke a written response on that blogger's post then it should be worth more value. This is because many people - and I'm guilty of often - lurk their way through posts without stopping and sharing a thought. If you're prepared to stop and comment on this post then pick 3 hearts for it
4. I'd rave about this post - When a post affects you enough to share it in forums, on Facebook or Twitter then select 4 hearts for it - it probably deserves it.
5. I'd link to this post - Finally the most valuable option is linking to it - primarily because it rarely occurs. There are far more links via Twitter or comments on a post than actually blog links. Therefore, if you would link to it via your own post then it certainly deserves 5 hearts.

I have been sorting a few teething issues over the past few days - I've come to expect that even though something works fine for me once it goes live all hell breaks loose! These are finally starting to be worked out and will be completed within the next few days. Fingers-crossed!

The Popular pages and New Blogs page are still under construction and will be a few more days yet - possibly even a week or two. I'm using your picking data to compile the new lists hoping to make them fairer and fresher for all bloggers.

I'm keen to know your thoughts on the new system and if you find any errors you want worked out. NOTE: please don't add errors that others may already report within the comments. Cheers.

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?

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.

4. 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.

I want to outline my ideas for how this new scoring regime might happen and seek your comments, suggestions and opinions before I embark on creating it all. From my point of view I think it will be a far superior scoring system but I'm keen to hear your ideas as well, and if you think it combats all that people are hoping to achieve with posts and picks.

Making Pickers READ Posts

Firstly, let's understand that no system will be completely infallible in achieving this but we can certainly tinker toward this end. A few Blotanists have suggested that we score blogs on whether they receive comments or not. Unfortunately, this requires extra code to be placed on your blog and most blogging Blotanists run Blogger or Wordpress blogs that don't accept scripts - major challenge!

The second flaw with this is how do we value a comment. Should "Great post. Thanks!" be valued the same as a comment from someone who has written paragraphs of very useful information? Obviously not. So how do we weigh up which comments score and which ones don't! IMHO, I suggest we don't even go down this path.

A Possible Solution

So, my solution is that we implement a 'reading-comprehension-style-voting-system'. This works like such: when a Blotanist goes to Pick a post they are required to also click one of (12?) possible categories for the post demonstrating why they enjoyed the post. For example, "Great Writing", "Brilliant Photos", "Helpful Garden Tips" or even "Non-Specific Post". For this the Blotanist gets one (1) point.

The writer of the post also categorises their post similarly and scores ten (10) points for that - the higher points to encourage the blogger to categorise. If the blogger and the picking Blotanist's choices match then the picker ends up with an extra three (3) points for their pick - a total of four (4) points.

I'm also contemplating whether the posting Blotanist should be awarded one (1) point for every Pick their post receives. Plus, another one to consider is whether we double points earned by non-blogging Blotanists.

The challenges

As with everything there are always downsides and this solution is not exception. Firstly, what if the posting Blotanist doesn't categorise their post? Or, what if the posting Blotanist deliberately selects an option that has nothing to do with their post?

In response to the first challenge we can make a time limit (ie 7 days) for a Blotanist to categorise their post. If they fail to do this within that time period then we take the majority vote approach and award pickers if they were in the majority group who categorised the post similarly.

The second challenge could be counteracted by way of review. That is, Blotanists can click a Review This Post button which requests someone (possibly a Guru member) to make an overiding decision on which category the post should be. This may, in turn, award Guru's with extra points for doing this and charge Blotanists points for requesting a review if it goes against them.

Over To You

So there you go, the cards are on the table and I'm keen to hear your opinions and thoughts. Feel free to request more detail if you feel it's missing or add suggestions for how this process could work better.

PS. Just as a side note, I am still investigating a Level higher than Guru for the future but it won't happen until after the upgrade.

Over the next week though you should start to some major changes being applied to this area. I'll be rolling them out individually after testing to make sure they're not going to throw out too many bugs. As each one comes out I'll try and explain the change and why the modifications were made.

So, the first 'cab off the rank' is the Popular Posts page. This is the page you arrive on when you first click the Picks tab. While we did modify it quite considerably in the middle of last year, it needed some extra changes to help an ever-growing Blotanical community.

Change #1: SPEED
This page was getting a little tardy in the speed department so it has been sped up quite considerably - and will continue to speed up even more over the next few weeks. In actual fact, you should notice that this page is twice is fast to load the first time and each time you load thereafter it should be even faster. The goal will always be to make it faster than it is with even more functionality added to it.

Change #2: POPULAR POSTS FRESHNESS
When Blotanical was in its infancy, this page correlated the picks data based on a 5-day cycle. We then cut it down to 4 days (unfortunately an old page slipped in since the server update and it reverted back to the 5 day cycle) and now it's been reduced to a 2 day cycle. Hopefully we shall reduce this down to a 24 hour cycle meaning the freshness of popular posts will be even crunchier!

Change #3: TOP PICKERS
This may seem like we're encouraging Blotanists to just become Picking junkies to make it onto these lists - and I'm sure we'll cop some flak for this. However, while not in place just yet - and may still be a week or two away - a new Picking score system is due soon. This new format aims to encourage Blotanists to "READ" the posts rather than just Pick them for points. It will become much harder to 'game' and in future bloggers will be rewarded for their posts.

As always, I'm keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

However, I took the difference between your amassed points as at 18 Feb 2010 and your current total, and added any that you had accrued since then. Hopefully, the result is the amount of points that you should have had if nothing had changed.

I'm sure you'll let me know if they aren't!! ;-) lol.

Firstly, "No", this was not the update I've been promising - that is still in the pipeline and this little fiasco has slowed the process even more. Instead, a few days before I was about to renew my contract with my server host they emailed me advising that the package I used was no longer going to be offered. Plus, I had 7 days to find a new one.

While 7 days to download your site's pages and data may seem like a long time it isn't when you need to; source another option that is going to be more reliable, fit in your day job, suffer an electricity blackout because some young goon has gone and set fire to the wetlands (not as wet as one might expect in the middle of summer) behind us plus all the other necessities of life.

Needless to say I didn't get 'round to adding this post before I needed to hastily exit. I've had a few emails forwarded to me suggesting that I should have written a post or emailed everybody but unfortunately when your data is all tied up in gzipped files it doesn't allow such a luxury. Instead, I tried tweeting a few messages using my @bussogardener profile. In future I shall use my @Blotanical one instead so it may pay, even if you don't like to use Twitter, to follow this one just so I can inform you if faults occur and other forms of communication aren't available.

Once with the new hosting company there were a few issues that had to be sorted out and this cost us extra time. I won't bore you with the details except to say that some of the problems were purely coincidental. The timing of some security issues just happened to occur at the same time as the site was trying to get up.

Many members have been mentioning that their points and status levels have dropped since the initial fault. This should be rectified within the next few days as I write some code to handle the differences. This won't affect the points that you amass at the moment.

As for that much anticipated update - I have a few changes that will roll within the next week or so. These are primarily to do with making the Picks section much quicker and hopefully easier to navigate. They do include some of your suggestions and I shall explain them when they come out.

I just want to thank you all for being so patient with me, and Blotanical, and hope that the relationships that have been forged weren't too badly bruised in the mix-up.

This week we're going to look at what you thought were your Least Preferred Aspects of Blotanical and here a graph may be helpful;

Taking line honours is the unsurprising Navigation - your least preferred aspect of Blotanical. It's no surprise really as this site has just kept growing and been added onto like a rabbit-warren. Most social media sites dismay in this area because the more people that are involved the more options that us developers love to implement for y'all. Yet, it doesn't make navigating a site a friendly task and often becomes quite tedious.

Navigation is the main reason for the upgrade of Blotanical, dubbed Blotanical 2.0, and through it I hope to achieve a more friendly user-initiated framework to meander through rather than bumps and jumps.

The key idea behind the updated navigation is that from any page you are able to quickly see where you are, what options are available and if you like the page you can add it to your own specific set of links. These links can then be sorted visually so that you can easily keep your most preferred version of navigating Blotanical at your fingertips.

If you want to add anything to this conversation, or aspects of the navigation system that may be helpful (even citing sites that have navigation that you prefer) then feel free to comment below.

Regardless, I'm really happy you all shared so openly and honestly. This is the best feedback I've received because it's not based purely on one or two member's opinions. And while there have been some surprises, and a few that have left me scratching my head, most of the responses have solidified what we've all been thinking.

The number one aspect that most people enjoyed about Blotanical was the Navigation - ha, just joking ;-) Not surprising, it has come out as one of the least preferred aspects of Blotanical and is my number one priority for Blotanical 2.0.

Speaking of an upgrade, it was surprising to note that most of you were happy to see some changes occur.

While 47% took the easy step and sat on the fence, 44% said they were looking forward to an update while only 2% fear it like the plague. This is helpful to know as we push ahead with the improvements hoping to rectify some of the issues that you raised through the survey.

As promised in the email newsflashes, one respondent will pick up either a 2yr subscription to Organic Gardening (if they live in the US) or a copy of Nancy Ondra's The Perennial Care Manual: A Plant-by-Plant Guide: What to Do and When to Do It if they live outside the US. As noted below, each respondent has been allocated a number in the order that they completed the survey.

Random.org was then employed to generate a number between 1 and 165 and the winner was #90 - Linda_Patchwork. Congratulations Linda, I just need some address details (email me at scrobins@westnet.com.au) to send out your prize.

Thanks again and I shall divulge some more of your responses as I get some time to read through them all.

Shirley has started a new site called the GardenWorldReport offering streaming and on-demand videos for gardeners to view around the world. In this week's episode she, and Billy Goodnick (Garden Wise Guy), honour some of our Blotanical Award winners including Carol from May Dreams Gardens, and Anna - Flowergardengirl amongst others.

If you want to see the video then head to the GardenWorldReport and click the "On-Demand" button. You will see the "Garden Book and Blog Awards Show 10/18/09" at the top of the list. You can also leave a message in the chat box or hold a discussion with whoever is online at the time.

A big kudos to Shirley for putting this together and I look forward to watching future episodes.

While there were minimal slip ups this year in terms of coding there was one major faux pas. I forgot to double-check the Major Blotanist Awards and inadvertently missed some irksome code which limited the number of finalists. This has now been rectified but alas relegates Gail to runner-up in the Best Commenter Award and Bangchik to runner-up in the Blotanist of the Year Award. Congrats are certainly in order for Frances for taking both of those awards out. To Gail and Bangchik - my humble apologies.

For those offering feedback, thank you very much. It all goes to making next year's better and with all the positive Tweets and Posts that have been circulating the online world Blotanical has been attracting a heap of new members - gardeners and bloggers alike.

As mentioned in the last newsflash a survey will be out soon requesting your opinions, feedback and suggestions for how Blotanical will keep developing. I'm hoping that you will all share your thoughts so this community-driven site can become a better community.