Link this, SocialRank

[Update: I thought, since I mentioned Snap Shots in this entry, that I should just turn this feature on in this blog instead of sending you elsewhere. Done. Unfortunately, it turns out not to be a magic bullet, as you'll see if you scroll over the mathbloggers.com link. However, the cached Snap Shots image at The Unapologetic Mathematician that I refer to below still worked the last time I checked.]

I've noticed in the past couple of days, trackbacks appearing on many math blogs for a site named mathbloggers.com. Well neat, I thought, a new math blog. Unfortunately, that site is password protected, so clicking on that link is not going to get you very far. However, the site is evidently not shielded from search engines and the like, and if you roll over the trackback link on a blog that has the Snap Shots feature enabled, you can see that it appears to be just a link aggregator site. (For example, as of this writing you can use this post at The Unapologetic Mathematician and scroll to near the bottom of the comments.) There is one other thing, though, and that is the phrase "powered by SocialRank" on the trackback link.

What is SocialRank? On the Snap Shots image I can make out the blurb, "SocialRank brings you the most popular stories that people are paying attention to right now." If I try Googling "socialrank", I find a great number of these aggregator sites on all variety of topics, and all apparently password protected. Well now, SocialRank isn't going to be bringing me much of anything if I can't get to any sites powered by it... Could this be some bizarre new kind of comment spam? Did someone figure out a new way to hack search engine rankings or something? I tried doing a whois lookup on some of the sites and found that they were registered to someone named Michael Reining at a company called MindValley.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. MindValley appears to be a "Web 2.0" type of company dealing in e-commerce and web marketing and the like, based in Kuala Lumpur. And, they have a blog. On it, they explain a little bit about SocialRank:

We develop breakthrough applications that have the power to be very disruptive. We are currently working on a project called SocialRank that will instantly be able to surface the top blog posts for 1,000 blogging communities online. To help us pull this off, we have hired one of the smartest mathematicians from the leading technical school in India and assembled an all start team of developers. The algorithm is nothing short of breathtaking because for the first time you will instantly be able to see 1) the top stories coming out of every blog community and 2) see which blogs are the hottest right now to see where the conversations are happening online.

So there you have it. I'm guessing that when they feel their product is ready for public consumption, the password protection will come off those sites.

Oh, and that mathematician, a fellow named Talat, has a blog entry with a math anecdote from his youth. Maybe we can get him to submit something to the Carnival of Mathematics :)