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