Google Blogoscoped

Monday, March 13, 2006

Upwarded

I’ve become a big fan of social link site Digg, and now I wanted to give this a try too. At the new Upwarded.com, you can submit your links to fun and funny videos, images, articles and Flash games and let others vote your link on top, digg-style. To reward everyone participating and show more info on authors who submit, the top Google result for your chosen nick name will be displayed in a couple of places on Upwarded.

Naturally, the site will need your help to get up and running – it needs a “wise crowd” to work. As opposed to Digg and other services like it, I wanted to try make this one registration-free, so it’s now working on a cookies/ IP “memory.” The reason is simple: many people (including me) don’t like to always register for new sites, or have passwords ready once the cookies are gone. (A no-registration approach has pros and cons, obviously... not only will it be easier to post links, it will also be easier to send along spam.)

You can also include Upwarded on your blog using a widget which shows the current top 3 of all links.

How does the ranking work? I assign a score to each link item in the database for easy sorting. The score is re-calculated for all items every 10 minutes using a server job. The job goes through all votes, and adds up score points for every vote – a vote on a link discovered on the “discover links” page will be counting more than a vote from the front-page, and older votes are weaker (or if they’re too old, disregarded completely). I’m also interested to hear your ideas on ranking algorithms for digg-like systems.

A special thanks for testing & thinking up features goes to Peter Dawson and Robert Gale... so thanks guys!

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!