I have always thought that one aspect of the social networking scene is that it mimics real life in many respects. In my opinion this is another example of just that.

It is called socialmeter. This site scans the major social "places" on the net such as; del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, Furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Netscape, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl and Yahoo My Web. You dump a link in the place provided and the URL is gauged as to it’s popularity among the above services. A page loads that’s gives you a nice graph with numerical results as well as a "socialmeter score". I think this is a representation of instances of that link on these sites. You can click the link to the scores to visit the references of the search on that particular site.

Nifty? Yes. Looks good? Yes. Purpose? Not yet established. So my conclusion was that it is a bit of an ego stroking exercise, if you have a blog or web site. It could also be a way to establish where the greatest "buzz" might be around a certain story or web site.

 But I really don’t like the idea of a popularity contest. I believe that everyone has something to contribute and we should not make decisions based on a "test" for popularity. But then again that is much like real life. It reminds me of school.

Interestingly, a search of http://www.socialmeter.com gives you a score of 2,024. Most of this score is derived from Digg - 1,386 and second is del.icio.us - 491 then 147 from Technorati. With zero from Google and the rest. While the score seems good next to our humble blog here, I am not sure that no references to Google is a good thing. Anyway, that is what popularity is like when you think about it.

If you are into this sort of thing you might get a kick out of it, but I am not sure there is much point to it. The quest for popularity and the quest to be popular and the need for a way to measure it was more interesting to me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 2:18 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.