Social Rank versus Page Rank

As I was reading my SitePro News newsletter today, I was brought to a blog post on the SitePro news blog, saying that Social Rank Soon to Supplant Page Rank.

But the article was not what I thought it would be about. The blog post was more about a site SocialRank.com which is an aggregator for blog posts and using their technology determine which 15 of the million posts make good sense.

SocialRank monitors thousands of blogs in popular categories and identifies the hottest stories, bloggers and posts of the day. We do this democratically by measuring what stories users link to, talk about and pay attention to.

The result? You now know the hottest stories and blogs in your favorite fields.

Well. Its not a new concept.

Anyway, what was going on in my mind, instead was literally “Social Rank”. The ranking of your site based on how connected you are to other blogs, and how deep your relationships are with these other bloggers (or Internet users). I feel this is something which the current metrics are unable to measure.

Technorati has a blog authority ranking - and it is basically a measure of the number of incoming links to your blog in the 6 months. While this does give a very rough gauge of “Social Rank”, I think links are just links. Someone can just be good in writing great content, or can be giving out free software in exchange for links, and he could push himself up the ladder in Technorati ranks. To them, a link is a link, and that is it. It does not measure the degree of the relationships.

The XFN project could be a way to start this measure, but unfortunately, not many pay attention to the “rel” attribute in HTML links.

XFN puts a human face on linking. As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes.

If everybody were to use XFN style links, and declare their relationships honestly, and we could base Technorati authority ranking only on XFN links, it would be wonderful All our blogs could turn into one large Friendster! Heh!

Tags: building-relationships, social-rank, technorati, xfn