kata ta biblia

a blog exploring Christian origins, biblical studies, social/cultural history, method, education and the journey through academia

Biblioblog rankings… I guess.

I just learned from Jim West that there is this list ranking Biblical Studies blogs on this thing called Amazon UnSpun. I’ve never heard of Amazon UnSpun, but apparently it’s related to Amazon.com and it seems to be a community of lists. People vote and comment on the items on these lists. I guess that’s interesting. The seventh most popular list in the past 30 days is “Best Things about Rhodesian Ridgeback Dogs.” I entered my own blog on the list (of biblioblogs, not Rhodesian Ridgeback Dogs) since it wasn’t there yet and then it just appeared at #6 on the list! I don’t know what’s up with that. I’m sure it will change soon. Also, they put some mysterious number on the right side of each item and I don’t know what that’s about either. At first I thought it was the amount of votes and since Jim West had 3333 next to his blog name, I thought he must have voted for himself a couple thousand times. Alas, not even he would do such a thing. Here’s a widget of the voting thus far:

I put some others on there too. Once I started rearranging my own personal rankings (which is very easy to do), it made a significant difference in the order of the community rankings… so that apparently makes a bigger difference than just voting, at least it does right now, while not many people have voted yet. I currently have a much inflated position on the list. I’m sure it will get more realistic with more votes!

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3 Comments by Patrick George McCullough  /  April 14, 2007  /  Posted in: biblioblogs
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  • Jim

    Pat, how many times did you vote man???

    ;-)

  • Patrick George McCullough

    Well, I voted for a couple of them once. But once I made a list, that changed things up significantly. I don’t think this list is very reliable…. at least not yet.

  • Patrick George McCullough

    More info from the FAQ:

    Won’t UnSpun rankings be subject to vote spam?

    UnSpun provides a number of mechanisms to eliminate bad votes. The first is that people must first log in with a valid Amazon account before they can vote, submit new items, or create new lists. Each user can only vote one time per item so one user is not able to “stuff the ballot box” with votes. Additionally, merges of duplicate items and deletions of inappropriate items (items that don’t belong in that particular list) are corroborated by a combination of the community and an editorial team. The combination of these features will help us to maintain the integrity of the rankings.

    How do you ensure the quality of the rankings?

    UnSpun requires users to log in before they are able to add rankings to the lists. If we find any users that have been abusing the site, we can roll back any changes or additions that user has made to the site. Because you have to have an Amazon account to contribute to UnSpun, we can be sure that the rankings are not done by automated bots and can limit the spam added to the site. Additionally, every list page contains edit links that encourage the UnSpun community to merge duplicates, edit misspellings, identify misplaced items, and tag offensive content. In this way, inappropriate entries can be quickly eliminated.

    How do I interpret the ranking numbers?

    List items have a computed score based on the number of people who have ranked the item and at what position it was ranked. We’ve indexed the score so that the 3rd item is always 1000. Items that are ranked higher and lower have their scores adjusted accordingly. This allows for general comparison of top items across lists. For example, if George Bush is the top item in a list with a score of 6914 and Angelina Jolie is the top item in another list with a score of 3118, and Verizon is the top item in a third list at 1427, you can deduce that George Bush holds a stronger first ranking, compared to other items on that list, than Angelina Jolie and Verizon in their respective lists.