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I am building a service that finds popular posts from several blogs. What criteria could I use to define what the most popular posts are?

For example, I track Facebook and Twitter share counts for every post of every blog and I rank the blog posts for their share counts. But that isn't the best solution because some bloggers can increase their sharing counts with fraudulent shares.

What would be a better set of critera to rank what the most popular posts are?

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The choice of criteria is not a design question. – ChrisF♦ Mar 3 '12 at 23:02
So where can I ask my question ? I mean in which stackexchange site ? – user49042 Mar 3 '12 at 23:10
I don't think there's a site where it would be on topic at the moment. Can you clarify and expand - by editing the question - on what you are trying to do. – ChrisF♦ Mar 3 '12 at 23:14
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The question was flagged, but perhaps I was too hasty to close - I'll reopen, but I think it would help your question if you could expand on what you are looking for. – ChrisF♦ Mar 3 '12 at 23:31
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@ZJR "algorithm and data structure concepts" is the first item in our on topic list. If there was a specific implementation problem with an algorithm, then it would be on topic for Stack Overflow. However whiteboard questions belong on Programmers. – Yannis Rizos♦ Mar 4 '12 at 12:42
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1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

Any popularity counter can be gamed. PageRank used to be notoriously gamed through Google bombs until Google changed their algorithm. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera has said:

The way I view it, Techmeme is gamed continuously because the real world is gamed continuously: Gamed in the sense that bloggers have always traded links and various other gestures of attention, sometimes through unspoken agreements, sometimes not.

One thing you can consider is the diversity of outbound links for a given Twitter or Facebook user. If this user doesn't have many likes at all, or if most of the likes point to a single blog, then you may want to discount this user's weight.

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+1 good point on diversity. – Dipan Mehta Mar 4 '12 at 8:52

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