It's been quite a while since my creative juices have flowed and led to some new ideas for projects. My summer consisted of lots of relaxing time off work, training for triathlons and half marathons and a change in jobs. Now that I've settled down and settled into my new job I've found my entrepreneurial drive again.
I'm currently reading (listening to the audio book on my iPod Touch at the gym) The Search by John Battelle. The book describes in detail how past and present search engines rank websites. Google's PageRank receives a great deal of focus for its renowned system of ranking a site based on its inbound links and the rankings of these links. It seems like a good system to measure link popularity. It also seems like the barrier to getting a good ranking must be pretty high. How can a new online news site ever catch up with cnn.com or nytimes.com? How can a new online news site even catch up with local news sites that have been online for a few years? These sites have a huge head start in generating inbound links. What I would like to do is measure how viral new websites and trends are by looking at the growth of inbound links (not counting links generated through search index spamming techniques.)
I bought the domain ViralRank.com today for the project. My idea is to create a site where users can turn on "inbound link tracking" or "viral tracking" for a specific website. I'll use a tool to be determined (most likely the Yahoo Site Explorer API) to count the growth of inbound links. I'm not sure exactly what this little experiment will prove but who knows....maybe this will be a good indicator of new online trends. Maybe it will show excitement for new products or deals or rumors of deals by long-existing companies.
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