I thought I’d take some time to jot down a few changes that were implemented in myScoop for February 2010. I have received numerous requests on a number of matters regarding the changes that have taken place on the aggregator. The information below may be able to help you understand what has changed and at the same time give you a clearer idea of how things in myScoop land work.
Social Bookmarking
Due to various reasons I have decided to shut down the social bookmarking section. There was no substantial referral volumes being created in this section, and to be honest, not many people were using it. I may or may not reinstate the section at a later stage once I have given it more attention and created better features. I may also decide to create a completely new site just for the social bookmarking section. Only time will tell. In the meantime, a great alternative has been created from a web entrepreneur I engage with regularly: MediaPress.
The Popular Section
“How does the popular section work?” I have received plenty of requests on this over the past few days, and all within reason as I have made a few tweaks here and there without informing anyone. This was purely for testing purposes. As it stands today, myScoop uses the following method to calculate which posts get shown in the “Popular Section” on the front page: If your article has more than one comment, and has received the most amount of unique clicks through the myScoop website, and through the myScoop shortened URI’s during the passed 72 hours, it will appear on the front page in the relevant category. At the moment, there are no spots for Sports, Politics and Blogging due to the lower quantities of articles being published on those categories.
Comments
I have decided to display the amount of comments of each article, this not only lets users see how popular and active a particular article is, but these statistics will also be used soon enough to rank your blog in the new section I intend to create – “Top Interactive Blogs”. This will also promote interactivity between blogs and blog readers.
Categories
I have created and altered categories in order to make things a little easier for the user. I feel that the layout before had too much information on one page and in one section and was intimidating for users to browse through. If you feel that I am missing any categories, please let me know.
Search
The search function has been updated to include blog names (and blog addresses) when checking against the database. This means that your search will not only look for articles that match your query, but blogs as well.
Ping Blog
I have created the well-needed “Ping Blog” function. When clicked on, myScoop will immediately fetch your latest articles. This is very handy if you do not like waiting those few extra minutes for the myScoop crawler. With that being said, I have doubled the rate at which the myScoop crawler fetches your articles.
Stats
Instead of having the graphs on the “myPage” section, I have decided to give the stats a separate page. This means that your live stats and your 14 day stats graphs will be on one page.
Features Coming Soon
- More detailed blog statistics – including: User browser percentages and a monthly stats graph. Your opinions and ideas are welcome here.
- As I mentioned above, a new section for “Top Interactive Blogs” showing off the blogs with the most comments (totaled average – debatable)
- More categories – as per your validated requests.
- Overall stats section – displaying the blogosphere statistics as a whole.
- myScoop widgets and gadgets (to be announced later)
As always, if you have any comments, suggestions or ideas, please let me know! You can contact me directly on nickduncan.sa @ gmail.com or simply add a comment below. Until next time. Happy Scoopin’ !
keywords: myScoop
