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- Plumbb is a widget that brings a new layer of content to your blog. Plumbb turns your blogroll (or any list of feeds) into a mini RSS reader that refers readers to other feeds with related content. Unlike a normal blogroll, readers can customize the list by adding or deleting feeds depending on personal preference. Plumbb also filters out the Top 10 "Most Popular" and "Most Discussed" posts from all the posts on your feed list over the last 30 days. The Top 10 lists are also customized based on readers' chosen feeds and which posts they have already read.
- With new content from Plumbb available, readers won't leave your blog after reading your post. Instead, they will stick around and explore other content related to your "blogspace"—the space you blog about. Instead of a 2 minute visit, you may have a 20 minute visit. And readers may come back even on days when you haven't posted new material. In a sense, you've turned your blog into a portal about your blogspace.
- Most people who read blogs do so by visiting blog sites directly. This is because many people either don't know what RSS is or don't like the regimentation of reading via these readers. For those who have tried and discarded RSS readers in the past, the Plumbb approach offers a bite-sized feed list that is centered on a single blogspace. In contrast to the Kudzu-like collections that often grow on RSS readers, the feed list is limited and "co-managed" by someone they trust and read---you.
For readers who don't use RSS or are intimidated by it, Plumbb is a great way for them to reap the benefits of RSS without having to deal with setup or maintenance. They don't need to pick a reader, and they don't need to assemble the feed list—Plumbb does it for them.
Finally, Plumbb lets your readers stay focused. Instead of going back to an RSS reader (where they can get easily distracted), they explore these feeds in the context of your blog and at a time when they are in the frame of mind to explore your space. - You may have noticed that major media sites, such as the NY Times, CNN, Reuters, etc, display similar sets of Most Popular or Most Blogged articles on their sites. These Top 10 lists are like "reading candy"— articles read on impulse that keep readers on the site. Given the prominent location that these lists have along the top of each article, you know they must be a very effective use of real estate.
Plumbb lets your blog offer the same type of enticing content. But where can a single blogger draw the supplemental content from? Well, think of your blogspace as a "meta-magazine", with your content being the featured story. And just like the NY Times pulls the best articles from across their whole news site, Plumbb pulls the best posts from your meta-magazine. When readers are through reading your post, Plumbb leads them to the best content to read next. - Just be a little patient. When you create Plumbb, our servers take time to analyze your feeds, don't worry, they will be there soon.
- In fact, it does, by being totally personalized. First, the lists on Plumbb are personalized because each reader has their own edited list of blogs from which the lists are drawn. Second, we track which articles on the list your readers have already read. Once read, we substitute new posts on the lists, so your readers will always have something new, novel, and compelling to draw them to these lists.
- Well, we don't ask your readers to vote for articles as that can be intrusive and gives a skewed vote if only a few people vote. And we don't just tally up click-throughs from our widget, in part because each reader can have a different list of blogs from which the lists are compiled. And of course, we don't have all the page-view data that a site like Reuters has when they assemble their list.
So we canvass public bookmarking sites to see which posts have been saved most often. We also blend in the reading data we have from our widget and add in some other secret ingredients. For the Most Discussed list, we tally the number of comments on a post and the trackbacks it has.
The end result is that the Most Popular list tends to be comprised of more evergreen articles and the Most Discussed list has articles that are more newsworthy but not necessarily ones you would want to save for later reference.
For both lists, we look at how the metrics for a given post compare to the metrics from previous posts on the same blog. The ones that are furthest above average qualify for the top 10 lists. By using this relative measure, a feed list comprised of small and large blogs will produce Top Ten lists representing multiple blogs regardless of size.
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