A little over a week ago Andrew at B4L started a sort of experiment with recommendations for blog posts. It seems like it might be a good idea as long as it doesn’t lead to Woolworths record department syndrome.

Some people may not have heard about WRD syndrome because it is something I made up – another of my frequent contrived and incoherent analogies which nobody else appreciates. Anyway, I don’t know what they are like for music now, but Woolies always used to sell a fairly limited range of albums and all the top 30 chart singles, but only the top 30 singles. As a kid I used to wonder about that. If they only sold the top 30, how did anything get into the top 30?

It seemed to me that Woolies depended on other shops existing in order to have a top 30 to sell. I used to think that if all the other shops did the same, the whole system would fall apart. (I quite like the term WRD Syndrome actually. I’ll have to see if I can develop it to apply it to supermarkets selling bestselling books and stuff like that. Maybe it will catch on)

In the same way, the idea of recommended posts will only be successful if enough people ignore them and read more widely in order to be the first person to recommend a post. However, having met a fair few B4L people I’m sure that will not be a problem.

For myself I don’t think I will pay too much attention normally (unless so many blogs get affiliated that I can’t keep up) but will find it invaluable if I have been away on holiday (or if our power gets cut for a few days again) and only have time to skim the cream of the crop. For that reason alone I think its an idea worth pursuing.

From experience so far, there are a couple of refinements which might make it even better:

• Votes displayed on the main screen.
  At the moment you can only see how many (if any) votes a post has by casting a vote yourself.
• The ability to vote from within a post.
  I don’t know how this would work technically, but sometimes I might just go to the main page of a blog I particularly enjoy and read all the recent posts, or having followed a B4L link I might then follow sidebar links to a previous post. I might like what I see there, but to vote for it I would have to go to B4L and hunt through the main feed for it.
  I know this would only work if Andrew wrote a clever bit of code compatible with Blogger, WordPress, and other packages and everyone installed it on their own sites for it to work and that would be a drag.
  I also realise that this would mean that visitors from outside the B4L fraternity could easily vote, and this would probably be a bad thing for reasons which I can’t be arsed to go into now.

Today, Andrew published the first results of the voting, and it turns out I am the third most recommended blog so far, after Norm and Kerron. I’m not drawing any conclusions from that though; its one of those artificial situations like West Ham being top of the Premier League after the first game of the season. Having read a few books on maths and statistics I can work out why my ranking is artificially inflated.

The main reason is that there is a very small sample. I was surprised to see how small, but then it is early days. It is more than likely that there are only a handful of people actively doing any recommending and possible they are the more active ‘members’ of B4L. By virtue of geography I have met a lot of the most active members since there were meet-ups in Brighton and London and I live halfway.

I suspect that there is a trend towards the people doing most of the voting being those getting most of the votes. That is not to say everyone is voting for themselves, just that a smaller group who are more networked together and inclined towards each other’s sites are the early adopters.

That is not to say there is not a little bit of self-voting… I recommended one of my posts to see how it all worked, and then curiosity led me to recommend another to see if it had any recommendations already – see my first point above. Because of the slow start to this and small sample, such experiments have a disproportionate effect.

As a general rule I don’t approve of self-promotion in this sort of thing, and one danger would be that the whole thing turned into a game to get more votes which would defeat the purpose of helping to identify the most interesting posts. Then again, if I post something I am really proud of and which I feel deserves to be seen more or which I just think is very funny I won’t feel too proud to give it a recommendation but would resist the temptation to just recommend every single post.

All of which is a bit of a long-winded way of trying to encourage Andrew to keep at it with this sort of innovation.