I’ve received a few enquiries lately about how myScoop determines which articles are “popular” and which are not. The simple answer is to make use of the shortened URI of the article that myScoop generates once it has fetched and processed your latest article. This shortened URI is a basic “pointing system” that when clicked on, myScoop will record certain information and then redirect you to the correct article post linked to the shortened code. Follow these steps after logging in to get your myScoop shortened URI:
Go to “My Page” and scroll towards the bottom where your latest articles are shown, click the “More” link next to the article of your choice.
Copy the “Short Link” given on the page and use that for your twitter updates or facebook updates. By making use of the myScoop shortened URI, myScoop will record how many people click on the link and rank your article accordingly. myScoop tries to to exclude all bots and crawlers that add no value to the statistics, although every now and again one or two may be missed.
The “Popular Articles” are kept for a maximum of 48 hours, thereafter the article will fall off the popular article list and be replaced by a new popular article.
I hope to see more people making use of this system, after all, being on the front page has its benefits such as getting some of myScoop’s PageRank which in turn will help your blog do better. There is method in my madness after all.
Thanks Nic. Will use the myScoop short link in my tweets!
Great, I was also wondering about that section. Will use the short links from now on.
I think that’s a bit unfair tbh. For starters, not everyone will read this post and therefore know how to take advantage of this trick (and I don’t imagine that users will figure it out any other way). Furthermore, if you use this shortened URL on Facebook it creates a myscoop.co.za link with no other context rather than a short description and possibly a thumbnail if it were a link directly from the blog entry. Fb users are far more likely to click on the latter.
Surely what’s popular should be determined by how many click-throughs the post gets from/on myScoop? In other words, whatever is read the most by myScoop users should be what’s popular on myScoop.
Just a thought… Let’s keep things as democratic as possible.
I hear you Galen… I’ll definitely give this some more thought.
Well, don’t know about you guys, but as a newcomer to the scene, there are just too many places to go to get organised & set up. I’m looking for functionality from a central place, I think this was the idea behind the shortened URL on myScoop.
I do agree with Galen, popularity should be based on your page views on your blog.
Nick, just an idea ~ incorporate the blog page views’ in the equation to rank on the myScoop popular list, as you already have graph blog stats available. This would make it fair all round.
I wont be able to make use of the actual blog pageviews due to the fact that it wont give the smaller blogs a chance in hell, as the blogs with a few thousand hits a day will always dominate the popular list.
What Galen is referring to is how many people click through to your blog from myScoop.. which makes sense actually. This is how I orginally had it, but back then there just wasnt enough referral traffic being originated from myScoop. Now its a different story.
Sideways thought here, while I agree with Galen, I personally also use a URL shortener in my retweet and facebook buttons. Would it not be a good idea to work in an advertised shortener and corresponding API? Not sure what would go into that…
Ross, are you talking about sites like bit.ly ?
Yeah along those lines.
Well the reason for the myScoop shortened URI is that it’s their to track referral statistics. If I use bit.ly or another shortener I wont be able to track these stats properly.