I was looking through the various Feedburner reports on sites I maintain and came across Blogscope.net among the subscribers. At first I assumed it was just another scraper bot but when I looked it up i found that it was a lot more complicated.
This is what the Blogscope website has to say: Blogscope is an analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere which is being developed as part of a research project at the University of Toronto. It is currently tracking over 41.16 million blogs with 1128.63 million posts. BlogScope can assist the user in discovering interesting information from these millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search.
In other words, it’s not only an aggregator, it indexes words and allows the user to sort not blogs -unless they are referred to by name in a blog post- but terms, by relevance, recency, influence and combinations of these terms.
Relevance scoring ranks all documents that contain query terms in order of relevance to the query. This scoring technique ignores the date and time information associated with blog articles.
Recency scoring ranks documents according to date and time when they were posted, displaying the recent most articles at top.
Combination of recency and relevance combines the effect of recency of the article with its relevance to the query when displaying the ranked list. This scoring technique displays most relevant documents at top with a preference towards recently posted documents.
I’m not sure what real use it is for a small blog, but it’s a new toy and I’m going to play with it.
