How to Evaluate the Importance of a Blog

Blog has experienced a rapid development in recent years. In addition to its personal stage of personality, remarks exchanging and self-marketing, it also forms a network community of different knowledge and interest by building a blog network. Influence of some blogs has gone far beyond people's imagination. The interactivity and diversification makes that its organizational structure and quality of the information are in a great deal of difference, thus, construction of evaluation system is required to evaluate and filter the blogs of high quality.

Traditional evaluation method for network information resources is still applicable for blog evaluation. Some scholars use AHP to score content, architecture, interactivity and influence degree of a blog. The interactivity includes messages from visitors, number of comments, feedback speed and residence time. Influence degree includes visits, total links, as well as quality grade of linked blogs.

It is possible to build blog clues with links and reply links of related blog items, and then find important blogs through them. Usually we take human chain of a blog and use PageRank algorithm to select important blog information source. There are many similar algorithms to evaluate blogs, however, blog service providers, mostly use RSS feed numbers, PageRank, AlexaRank, traffic, comments / replies, TrackBack, etc., thus providing rankings of popularity to reflect the influence. These methods or indicators are now widely used in blog evaluation.

1.PageRank
Google's PageRank value is the most commonly used in blog evaluation. It flags the page level / importance, which is from 0-10. The higher the PR value, the more popular the page is.

2.AlexaRank
AlexaRank is a frequently used statistical indicators of visits, one can install Alexa Tool-bar in the browser to do statistics. It mainly depends on the number of visitors per day. A blog can improve the indicator value by using SEO, plug-ins, or Alexa toolbars of visitors.

3.Number of RSS subscribers
RSS is an easy way to share content online. One needs to have an RSS reader, or use the online RSS feed blog to manage blog content.

4.Number of Comments / Replies
Replie rate reflects readers’ interest in blog contents, and the influential blogs always get resonated. However, if comments or replies are not in a good number, but quality of them is high, or authors have a great influence, it should still serves as a reference in evaluation.

Overall, in order to get a satisfying result, when we evaluate a blog, we can take an comprehensive consideration of the evaluation methods according to the features and contens of a blog.

Cloud Collaboration of Microsoft Office Web App

Cloud collaboration services are developing fast, and an increasing number of them are about to change our life.On mentioning cloud collaboration, you may immediately come up with an example: Google Docs. However, in this blog, I’m introducing another similar service: Office Web App, which is based on Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

There are nearly 50 million users in the use of the built-in Office Web Apps in SkyDrive and Hotmail. Take Word as an example: the collaboration features in Word Web App is compatible with Word 2010, Word for Mac 2011. In Word Web App, while another user is in the editing of this document, you can see the yellow bubble on the reminded article:

The following picture is the UI of multiplayer editing in Word 2010. You can see the position where other users are editing, as well as the contents they havs edited (with green background). You can also be view who is in the editing in the status bar in the bottom.

Differently with Google Docs, Word Web App does not support the real-time synchronous collaboration mode. But if you need real-time, you may use the OneNote Web App. This means that if you are editing a piece of content, in order to prevent confusion, Word Web App will prevent other people to edit the contents of this section, until you press the save.

Here is a detailed video to show how it works:

Congnition Instantiating: 3 Levels to Form Knowledge

As we've already known, Kitchener, K.S. divided cognition into 3 levels:

Level 1: Congnition (Basic)
Level 2: Metacognition
Level 3: Epistemic Cognition

The  3 levels, especially Metacognition, seem not that easy to tell apart from each other. However, on daily use, we are unconsciously conducting the 3 steps to form our knowledge. Thus, I'm here to instantiating the 3-leveled cognition. Hope that I'm not on the wrong idea about it.

When surfing on our social networks, we get posts from our friends or "neighborhoods", viewing their pictures, status, blogs, etc. We smile or laugh when coming across some funny or interesting things, or we feel touched while hit by a video. Further more, we comment, reply, or press a "like", expressing what we think. On this level, it can be called the first level, i.e. Cognition, but it is just a basic one.

If one person or some series of posts interest us, we usually add them into our "Fav List", or a starred list, or we can set some filters, to view them apart from the flooding timeline. That is, we specifically pick and learn more from our friends or RSS feeds, rather than read every post of them. If a post really seems valuable, we share or fav it, send it to reading list, or paste it into Evernote notebook for further study. Then, we schedule our time to do this, trying to learn and absorb things every day. This is Level 2, Metacognition, but some things may appear higher than just L.2, but still don't reach 3.

On Level 3, we form our real knowledge, we are not satisfied with just picking, reading, and regularly reviewing. We start to think more about the way we get them, or the materials themselvs. We start to realize that how many materials we can get from them, how far does it take to achieve some goals with them, and even the validity of the "knowledge" itself. We review and think more about them, and we may orgnizing our notes, fav list, etc. That is, we finally reach Epistemic Cognition.

The 3 levels may don't tell each other apart, and we usually soomthly go through the cognition and metacogniton and reach epistemic cognition. But in all, we enjoy this and we love knowledge, aren't we? :)

Elements of Social Networks into Real Life

Welcome to my blogspot and this is my first blog here. :)

I'm very interested in social networks and have enrolled in a lot of social networkings, such as Twitter, Facebook, 人人网, Instagram, Path, Google+, etc.

I enjoy reading the texts and images posted by my friends, as well as commenting and adding a "like" to them. Sometimes this kind of action reaches my real life. For example, when having lunch in a restaurant and finding something really really delicious that impresses me very much, I may become very excited and want to instantly share this to my friends. In this case, most people may take out their phone, take a picture and then post it to their social networks with an excited comment. But for me, besides this action, I may come into an impulse that I need to stamp a "like" onto the real menu (coz I cannot stamp it onto the food itself XDDD).

In fact, such impulse has occured in many people's mind, since social networking is developing so rapidly and reaching every corner of our life. Some objects containing these elements have come into our real life, lying in some stores waiting for their customers:

This is a Twitter-theme stationary case.

Familiar? Facebook Like stamp XDDD

Instagram camera. REAL camera that can take photos and print them at once!

So cute, aren't they? What I want most is that facebook stamp XDDDD and I'm going to buy one...

In addition, I'm imagining a restaurant with all their dishes attached with a big label to contain customer's stamps, thus, we can stamp on what we like most after eating. In this way, customers can easily see what the most popular dish is, and the restaurant itself can also adjust their service and update the menu according to the labels. If there comes such a restaurant, I'll rush there to press my first stamp XDDDD:

Thanks for reading my blog. :) and welcome to LIKE / +1 / Tweet / comment XDDD

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Cat Jia

The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Information Engineering
Master Student