PostRank, formerly AideRSS, is well-known on the social Web for its tabulation of "hot" blog posts and influential authors, based on social activity, including total number of comments, links within Technorati or Google, and postings to news sites, such as Digg and Twitter. The idea? Finding the best blogs and best stories from the mountains of information posted each day - finding experts and posts "that matter". Recently, the company turned on what I find to be a very interesting tool, essentially a group of APIs that third party companies can tap into, leveraging PostRank's information for themselves - to use any way they wish.According to PostRank, fully 97 percent of all content published online doesn't have any audience engagement at all. For companies looking to find the most active, relevant content, PostRank can essentially scrape the cream off the top, and deliver companies, via the new APIs, that content which matters, with as much or as little as they would like.
Different data cuts available to PostRank customers accessing the Real-time API include engagement thresholds, topic and keyword filters, and of course, timing. Potential feed sources only will include those that have gained audience interaction over the last 30 days, for example. In parallel, with the release of Data Mining APIs, PostRank customers can go back into two years' worth of the company's data, searching by level of engagement, topics or themes.
The goal, according to the company's Web site? "Socially relevant content, delivered in real time." One of the company's case studies includes Advertising Age, who is now leveraging PostRank metrics to help determine the "Power 150" list, relying much less on Technorati and Yahoo! - relative dinosaurs from the Web 1.0 era.
AdAge's post, from back in April, explains why they selected PostRank:
"Why's PostRank so great? For one, unlike other metrics, they provide real-time data. We'll only be grabbing it once a day like any other metric, but you can be reasonably sure that your recent hot post will be accounted for."Another partner is Gnip, who leverages PostRank to send relevant data to its own customers.
This release, while unlikely to land me the highest levels of social engagement I've ever seen, fulfills what many are saying is missing from Web services - a legitimate business model to enterprises that can deliver value. And PostRank is tapped in to all the right buzzwords. Real-time. Social. Engagement. While I tell you I have no fear of information overload, and can take the time to read all the blogs I do, others don't, so PostRank does the dirty work to only send the best ones through.