Obviously I can’t talk about BlogFriends – the purpose of this post is to check out whether or not the filtering algorithm is exactly how we’d like it. This is why this post randomly contains the words “startups”, “VC”, “venture capital”, “tech”, “Web2.0”, “investment”, “entrepreneur”, “iPhone”, “insider”, “Luke Razzell”, “identity” and other things I’ll add later.
If you’ve arrived at this post through the BlogFriends Alpha, please add a comment here to tell me. Thanks
Jof Arnold's Blog 
So, my code stands up then?
Benjie.
It goes without saying you’ve done a fantastic job… I’m just a little miffed that I haven’t found a bug yet as I practically promised Luke I could break the alpha!
Aha, found you via the “identity” tag!
I have reached this post via Blog Friends!
I arrived here, not through tags or filters but by following the notification that Jof had visited the site.
Thanks, Andy… that confirms something I was thinking about before: there are definitely some voyeuristic/curiosity elements to this, much like MyBlogLog.
Sorry, to clarify my previous post I arrived here in the same way as Andy. The notification that someone else has visited a blog post is a bit like getting a recommendation.
It is a bit like getting a recommendation, except that it’s merely a recommendation that the headline looks interesting, not about the blog post itself.
This could lead to some strange positive feedback distortions which dramatically magnify traffic to certain posts, based on a catchy headline. This might already be happening to some extent on FB with the apps names.
Hmm, my friend just added “Super Poke 3” I’ll go see what it does ( by adding it ) and so I pass on a recommendation to more friends before finding out that it’s rubbish.
I suppose then we all remove it again.
Lol – it’s all about the headlines Andy: if it weren’t, nobody would buy the Mirror! ;o)
But seriously, I’ve had a bit of a think about this already and I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing. First, they are blogs of your friends so it should be fair to assume a) the title is a fair reflection of the content, and b) you’ll probably like the content – this is a recommendation by association I guess.
Second, I think encouraging accurate and captivating headlines is a good thing; not only is this good for the user, but it is also good for the blogger since, assuming the blog is laid out in a semantic way, h1, h2, title, are weighted highly in search engines and will help boost traffic. If I remember later I’ll re-edit this post with a link to a similar discussion surrounding the cutline wordpress theme from peasonified.com.
Great little thread lurking here. ; )
Of course, if we were to build in post summary previews, then readers could make more informed link-clicking decisions…
v.2, here we come!
Ditto arriving here the same way as Andy, being a nosey sod as to why Jof was clicking on his own posts.
🙂
Here is an example comment.