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The post count on this blog has been dwindling somewhat recently. Spare time has been taken up working on a new project, Powncified which has been visible in the the side bar for a while. Powncified is a fan project of Pownce.com that uses the site’s API to find the most popular links posted by Pownce users in the last 24 hours. The top 10 links are displayed in order of the number of notes or “Pownces” that reference them. The total number of recipients, users that received any of the notes, is used as a tiebreaker. The application aims to provide insight into what links people actually value enough to share with their friends rather than just mark their appreciation of on social bookmarking sites. I discovered a similar site, PownceMeme by Bryan Pearson, that seemed to have a similar aim although I’m not sure of the algorithm applied there. It doesn’t seem to be based on any kind of “Pownce count” like Powncified. The other impetus of the project was to satisfy my own curiosity and once I started I had to follow it through.
The recipients tiebreaker is necessary as the numbers on the site aren’t that impressive at the moment. At the time of writing, the top link only had 3 Pownces in common. I’m hoping that, as the Pownce network grows, so will the correlation between the links people are posting. However looking at the last 6 months from Alexa this might not happen. The recent spike was likely caused by the extra publicity generated when the site opened up and left private beta on the 21st. However the traffic is already dropping. In any event the list will still hopefully serve as a resource of interesting links or at least satisfy those Pownce users with similar curiosities to my own.
I do intend to add a few additional features in the future. Certainly the ability to view the notes that refer to each link in another page. Also a similar feature that exists at Pownce and also PownceMeme whereby recognizable media such as YouTube videos and Flickr images are automatically embedded into the page. There are a few issues with the CSS layout I’d like to deal with as well. The page doesn’t resize so well and the background images of each list item would be better implemented with some kind of Sliding Door technique so that they resize to fit their content.
