I was looking through my referrer list and noticed that a blogger by the name of Ryo Chijiiwa (cool name) has created a script that looks for blogs that have similar links/wording as yours. The basic idea is that a blog that links to the same things as your blog has some topical commonality and may be of interest to you.
Test it out here and notice the eery results. Somehow I ended up related to Playboy, Hustler and MILF-Hunters Anonymous. Err, that was another match making service.
Anyways, there is a similar service through Blogging Ecosystem via an application called 'New Door,' developed by Mark Pilgrim (what can't he do?).
Neither one has a clear cut advantage and would probably benefit if they could somehow merge the code together (at least feature-wise). Mark's gives you a list of 20 "similar" blogs of which you can customize just like you do with Amazon.com (where you choose a sample of books/music/movies your interested in, Amazon then churns out a listing of similar products you might be interested in).
Ryo doesn't have that, but what he does have is an extensive listing of blogs and what links yours has with them in an "outline" format (you see exactly which links they have that are similar to yours). However, this would probably benefit casual bloggers more than myself, as I have hyperlinked to hundreds of sites. Another disadvantage of Ryo's -- he only has 1700+ blogs indexed to use in his comparison database, versus thousands in Blogging Ecosystem.
Posted by Tim at April 20, 2003 04:49 PM | TrackBackTim,
Thanks for your blog entry about BlogMatcher :-) I just wanted to post some updates...
I completely rewrote the searching/matching code in C (instead of PHP), and results pop up in less than a second now (in fact, often < 0.5 seconds). I've also added pagination for easier navigation.
I've refined the search algorithm a bit, partially inspired by your comments. I added some very basic statistical analysis in the scoring algorithm so that common URLs are scored down while uncommon URLs are marked up (at least in theory). It's still a little skewered for your blog, but I think the results have been improved somewhat. Also, the index has grown to 2900+ blogs (and I'm sure it'll continue to grow).
I wrote an FAQ if you feel like reading more about the whole ordeal.
~Ryo
Posted by: Ryo Chijiiwa at April 21, 2003 08:15 AM