This and the posts to immediately follow are my response to the foolishness Facebook is up to, charging folks to reach all their fans.  For those who haven’t heard, they will show your posts now to only around 15% of those who like your pages, and you will have to pay, per post, to fully reach your existing audience.  At first it can be enraging news, but I think it isn’t the end of the world, in fact I think is doing everyone a favor.  Here are my reasons, and today’s idea – a solution for all those who write or read blogs.

1. Liking is more about identity than it is about desiring spam.  You like something on Facebook to show support and identify with that thing.  You do not “like” something on Facebook out of a desire for spam.  It doesn’t matter if we are talking about music, news, or most anything else.

2. The exception to rule 1 is exactly that – something exceptional.  When I want to see the news I open a news app.  When I want to hear music I fire up a music app.  I don’t want to hear random thoughts from the musician I like, but if they are playing in my area and tickets are going on sale tomorrow, THAT would be justification for a notification.  As far as news, it’s the same thing.  The top 3 news stories from today’s cycle I’m not concerned with, but if something happens that is above the cycle, like the embassy attack for instance, then I want to have that in my feed.  We are obviously all different.  Some folks do want to see an update every half hour, but that isn’t the mainstream.  It’s an automated thing we are talking about, it needs to be adjustable and balanced so that users can get what they want, and the responsibility is on the content provider.

My personal take on the issue is that unless I have something monumental to say, I’m not going to spam anyone with it.  For the record, my definition of spam is anytime my content crosses the threshold of the web in the direction of someone else.  The blogs that are complaining about the Facebook charges (some who post 10-15 times a day) are ABSOLUTELY right to complain about the charges and the principle of what is happening, but I say Facebook is doing them a huge PR favor.  You simply should not be hitting anyone else’s email, news feed, SMS or anything else 10 times a day.

3. There is no viable scale of value.  Look at your news feed.  Facebook is using comments and certain words within a post to determine a basic “value” to place certain posts higher on the news feed, but the method is unreliable as Facebook is clearly untrustworthy to promote content based on value and they would rather go the way of YouTube and just quietly start scratching the backs of those who pay up.  Payola NEVER adds value to the end result.  I do not use this “top stories” feature, as it usually just leaves posts that I’ve already seen, up to see again hours later, not to mention that in light of this new monetization racket they are pulling, the fair question of the day would have to be, “is the “most recent” listing truly now a most recent listing?”

So what is the idea in here?  The solution?  Well I come to a wonderful solution to this mischief.  For today I am going to focus on the blog issue here and I will come back to Facebook as a whole later.  Besides, I’ll need some legs in the industry before I can truly start mocking them and enjoy observing the great migration of 2013 (more on that later).  Yes, for the record, I feel that those at “the top” in any field have a responsibility to provide a continuing service which trumps their bottom line.  Facebook has been very, very naughty and by my math is laying the social world out on a silver platter to the right product.

Back to the blog issue.  Bloggers talk about all things.  Literally all things, yet the majority go unread.  Many blog sites are unable to pay out the per post Facebook charges and won’t be able to spam their product out in the future like they used to.  This means even more posts will go unread, unless something can be done.  The solution is much bigger than just blogs, and applies to all content, but to explain it simply I will just use blogs as an example.   The first part of this solution is getting an automated, valid, and recognized numerical value associated with all known blog posts.  Quite simply, a valid measure of content value can be obtained by applying algorithms to the existing metrics we already have in place for all blog posts.  Furthermore, the addition of new metrics will add further validity to the number.

An algorithm should be used along the following basic idea – blog posts would receive a mathematical “grade” or “score” by comparing various, existing metrics/measures and additional metrics/measures soon to be added.  The basic premise would be the number of shares/tweets/shows of support divided by the total number of reads.

Here is a simple comparison.

posts X and Y have 10 shares each

post X has 10 views

post Y has 20

post X obviously has more value to the average reader.

When you combine the metrics of Tweets, shares on other networks, known links from other blogs, comments (a whole week could be spent on comment metrics) you can see the various ways math can be used to provide a number that if done intelligently, would provide real value.  This is not a question of if. This is going to happen.  I’m just some guy out of the loop, painfully watching those with hands on the levers wetting themselves.

Knowing that it will happen, the next realization is that it is going to create an entire industry.  Various filter providers will put their various scores on content, most of which will occur automatically and in real time.  This would allow folks to decide who they can relate to.  In other words, a blog post gets a hypothetical “69 WordPress score” and a “45 Blogger score.”  The reader could over time look at a blog rating just like a moviegoer can relate to a particular critic’s review before going to the theater.  Finally and ideally the ultimate scenario – a user will be able to select what is important to them, (perhaps Twitter is a bigger deal to them, so the filter they set up will calculate heavy on tweets and responses and perhaps they will only want to see individual bloggers instead of big firms like TechCrunch, so the filter will specifically calculate in favor of lower views).

I have hoped for such a system of rating using obvious and already available metrics used in an intelligent way for years now.  I was very frustrated to see YouTube reject the merit value of videos in favor of simply promoting videos that contain monetization.  This was short sighted thinking on their part.  At the time I could understand.   They weren’t making a profit, and getting larger by the minute.  I wanted to give them credit for trying to at least break even, but I became less tolerant of this over time, watching the overall value of content and the overall experience reduced each day.  This is actually harmful for everyone involved: YouTube, the content providers and the users.   Perhaps if I can demonstrate an automated and effective filter for blog posts, and the money that can be made providing it, the next target is YouTube.  So I keep writing.

The next step down this blogger’s paradise rabbit hole continues in tomorrow’s post.