Thursday, April 12, 2007

feevy gets exciting, very exciting

for me, feevy was exciting the day david told me about it. but lately, things are getting really exciting.

currently, there are more than 1500 users and more than 6000 connected blogs in the feevy universe. english-speaking bloggers continue to be the overwhelming minority of the feevy community. cool.

a feevy widget is now available for wordpress blogs. i know a lot of wordpress bloggers who have patiently waited for feevy on their blogs - now it's possible. a feevy blogroll for wordpress blogs is coming soon.

and, most exciting, alex has produced a graphic that visualizes the feevy community. david, pablo, and ryan have shared their ideas about what is going on, and i would like to share mine. but first, here's the graphic:


my first reaction is: i have no idea what this means. unfortunately, i have very little training in social network analysis. also, although i use google to translate david's blog posts from spanish into english, the translation is terrible, which means i am missing much context.

that said, it seems to me that feevy users are building networks, not nodes. put another way, we are building concentric communities, not long tails. with feevy, there are no so-called a-list bloggers, or blogstars, or, if there are, their reach is neither farther nor more lounder than the rest of us.

whatever it is, i look forward to seeing more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, networks not nodes. Here's a thought: the quality of links from within posts is different than the quality of links from a blogroll. My guess is that the "blogstars" gain many of the former; and our colleagues, friends, and acquaintances gain many of the latter.

Whereas the Technorati list shows us who is being talked about, you might say the Feevy map shows us who is being connected with.

Curious about your thoughts on this, David: who are the real influencers?

Anonymous said...

"the quality of links from within posts is different than the quality of links from a blogroll" - certainly. the quality is definately different and links from within posts are way stronger than those from within a blogroll.

more to the point, though, is this: the quality of links from within feevy is different from within a traditional blogroll. i seldom (if ever?) read blogs via traditional blogrolls. but with feevy, i'll click all the time - not only towards blogs on my own feevy but towards blogs on the feevies of others. feevy just adds so much more context for a post than does the traditional blogroll.

as for who's the real influencers ... i have no idea. but it seems to me that the important influencers are those who have something to say rather than those who bank on their technorati ranking, you know what i mean? talking points memo is influencing national politics - not because of marshall's ranking or inlinks but because he's saying something. other than that, though, it seems too early to say.

what i hope to see is influential networks, rather than influential nodes - influential collectives, rather than influential individuals.