Move over Google Reader

So it’s been awhile. First and foremost, I just want to say to those that have followed our progress since day 1, we appreciate your perseverance. Looking back at the designs/functionality of the previous couple releases vs what’s on the screen now, I wonder why you’re even reading this. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Now as for what we’ve added in this release: the ability to add your personal RSS feeds. Can’t find a blog profile on Pollis? Simply add it to your RSS on your profile page. “But Google Reader” you say, well its Google and they love trying stuff, seeing what comes of it and then they abandon ship. Google Reader is closing this summer and there’s probably a dozen other RSS feed aggregators in the works. We offer the ability to share rss articles to your friends with a simple click. Do you have dozens of pages bookmarked that you check daily and often copy the link, post it to a friend’s FB wall? Skip the search, copy and paste; just insert those bookmarked pages’ rss feed into Pollis and it’s a one stop shop for sharing and discovering content all from your newsfeed. We’re hoping we can get some traction using that feature. We’ve also added the ability to add friends (making the sharing easy), and the ability to share an RSS post (defaulted so only you can see them) to your public newsfeed. We made RSS social

Even with this RSS addition, we’re still keeping the focus on of the blogging portion of the site. We’ve added a blog chat window on each blog profile page allowing for users to openly discuss topics the blog circles around. It’s a much neater open chat forum of sorts. The ability to delete posts and block commenters on you blog page has been added, much like standard internet interactions allow with other platforms.

Our previous editing capabilities were rather unsightly for ranking your top 10 blogs, we’ve added a jquery click, drag and drop ranking method making it simple, visually aesthetic while impossible to overlap ranking two blogs the same number. When it comes to uploading profile photos, our new script allows for a custom selection of your uploaded photo. Managing your blog’s writers and admins is simpler too, a click to add or remove writer or admin privileges. We’ve also cleaned up the notifications, making it so you won’t get a notification for the same unchecked story over and over (ie if I rank your blog #1 on my page and you haven’t seen that yet, you won’t get blasted with a second identical notification when I rank it #1 again).

As always, we’re open to suggestions. I know many of you have come out of the woodwork at times asking about Pollis and giving your two cents. I’ve done my best to address all these comments and suggestions. We hope this final release is something that will begin drawing in more daily users with your help of course so we can begin expanding and bringing on more developers/marketers/ etc. Thanks for making it this far into the post and if you’re looking for content to write about, we would love to answer some questions for you to fill in a small section of your newest blog post/newspaper/e-journal or any press. If you would like to join the team, by all means contact me via email Justin [dot] fox [at] pollis [dot] com and let’s see what we can build!

What the hell is Pollis?

So you've seen statuses, tweets and hopefully an ad or a suggestion from a friend. You're likely wondering 'what is Pollis and what good does it do me?' You have your favorite news source, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, wherever and typically you browse titles that sound interesting to you. Some of these articles are actually blog posts that are featured by the news outlet. Bloggers blog about anything and everything that goes on in this world, even topics that are up to the minute events. Some of these bloggers are even on the ground in hotspots like Egypt, Algeria, Washington DC to name a few. Combining these factors, the main idea is to turn Pollis into your personalized newspaper. You subscribe to the blogs that are of interest and then get updates from them. Sign into Pollis in the morning and read your news that you want to hear about.

We've been live and accepting traffic outside our social circles since January 21st and already have a couple dozen blogs on record. So we hope you'll sign up even if you don't have a blog (yet).

Pollis Blog Scores

I swear there was thought behind the math that comes up with your blog scores. In fact, it was probably the first thing I contributed to The Pollis. When the scoring system was created I was still essentially very clueless in PHP/HTML/CSS and all the jazz that now makes up what you see on the site. However, with an engineering degree I had become well practiced in math, formulas, predictions and the creation of mathematically related systems.

But enough jibberish nerd talk and into what goes into the number you see on the blog profile pages:

First off we have three(3) main contributing factors:
-5 Star Ratings
-Top 10 appearances
-How many 5 star ratings you give out (we're trying to encourage you venturing through the entirety of the catalog, I mean that's the point of the site, right?)

First we take the average of the 5 star ratings that have been given to your blog.
Following that we have the top 10 ranking average. But wait, #1 means you're awesome which means you should get more points, right? Exactly. This took a quick subtraction of the average ranking value from 11. (If you're ranked 1 on average you'd get 10 points, 5 on average: 6 points, 10 on average: 1 point) I made it so that if you were ranked at all you get some points even if you think 10th should be worth 0. Hey, you worked hard to make it onto somebody's top 10 and 10th is still better than no recognition, so we're rewarding you with points.
Both the 5 star and the top 10 values are taken as averages from only the people that have given you the feedback. We wanted this score to reflect the community that you're engaged in, not the population of the site.

Examples:
So say you get 15 people to give you a 5 star rating and 20 people to rank you in their top 10:
Add up all the 5 star ratings and divide by 15 gives you Average Star Rating
Add up all the top 10 rankings and divide by 20 gives you Average Ranking. Subtract Average Ranking from 11 and your result is the Adjusted Ranking.

The final portion of the algorithm (only worth ~5% of your score)comes from your writers going out and giving other blogs 5 star ratings. Say you give out 10 ratings and there are 50 blogs on the site, you would get 10 divided by 50 points. 0.2 would be the value of your Ratings Given score.

The final summation and adjustment to get onto a 100 point scale looks like:

Average Star Rating + Adjusted Ranking + Ratings Given = Blog Score out of 16 possible points.

Take the Blog score and divide by 16 gives us a decimal less than 1 so we multiply it by 100 to get us a value out of 100.

This is only the first go at the ranking algorithms and I image as the site continues to grow, we'll have to adjust the equations to lessen the value of the Ratings Given portion. Personally I'd love to see all the blog writers go and visit every other blog profile page but if the site grows to a few thousand blogs and gets any traction, it'd be time consuming to keep up giving each blog feedback while keeping yours up to speed.

Hope you've enjoyed, and I would love some thoughts/feedback

-Justin

Onward & Upward!

He quit! Jake just quit. Don't worry, he's just quitting his day job to work on Pollis and its networking full time. That's dedication. Unfortunately, my 6 year college program put me a bit farther behind in student loans so I'm stuck grinding 8-4:30 for a paycheck then working nights on Pollis, which for the record I love doing. It's not to say I don't sneak in some tweets, fb posts and emails throughout the day at work for Pollis.

What's next for Pollis? Well the plan is to get a decently sized pool of users and blog readers that will attract a wide array of bloggers. Right now it's going through twitter and engaging users using #blog tag that have a blog & 500 followers or less. I figure if we can get ~500 users on Pollis, these 500 follower blogs would be more than happy to join a site that could double their readership. Hopefully from there, they bring their followers and some of their followers find additional blogs through Pollis and it snowballs.

So if you know a blogger, or somebody who's an avid reader, have them sign up for The Pollis and for bonus like the facebook page to follow the action. Soon we'll be posting a feed of blog updates from our blogs as they give us an update on The Pollis.
Facebook Page

And just as important, if not more so since we'll be giving out #PollisPromo stuff shortly:

Follow Us On Twitter

For those that are signing up for the Pollis for blogs or just readers, thank you and feel free to leave comments, questions, bug finds and general thoughts that come to mind. No filter required, just type it!

@shirefoxx
Pollis Blog Page
Metrics: As of 10:34 pm we have: 9 blogs (2 are awaiting verification), 37 users