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Ideas

Page View Popularity

To enhance the sense of community, and allow BBC News readers to guage story quality and relevance before they even click the link - you might want to track unique page views and make the information visible.

You could show popularity by highlighting the story links. If a story is more popular, it is more intensely marked. These highlight marks...

These highlight marks would fade out after a few seconds, leaving the page design undamaged.

Readers could quickly find clues to what is important to the community. They may discover that their interests are less important to other readers. Or if an issue is not getting the attention it deserves, the reader would be influenced to start broadcasting the story by forwarding the story link to their friends.

  • 20 May 2005 11:03 AM

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I think this sounds like a great idea. You could link this in to create a RSS feed of "Most popular stories" that people could use as a feed to get the most relivent stories of the day.

Take a look at:

http://home.liquidsand.co.uk/backstage/dynamic_ranker/

to see code working to dynamically determine the popularity of links. It's posted further down the prototypes section.

Not too pretty at the moment, but I could adapt it a little to alter the colour of links in-situ based on their popularity.

My initial idea was to re-order links dynamically, but colour-coding them could also work.

  • 3.
  • On 27 May 2005 11:03 PM,
  • Django said:

I've done this kind of thing with a community blog. It was a typical postnuke site but I hacked it so stories would be weighted and then positioned accordingly. I initially used a combination of page views and age to calculate the weighting which was OK but could get thrown out when a story was linked ot if we had a flurry of new stories. It worked really nicely with a natural feel when we mixed it with a manual weighting number which the story editor could add (positive or negative).

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