IDEA #30 - People Meter - Who’s Who Of The World 500 Ranking List
By Steve Poland • February 28, 2007
When I read Jeremy Kandah’s comment on this last post:
I think the “Jeremy Kandah” brand just went up 500%. Thanks for the post, keep in touch.
It sparked the following idea: You know the Fortune 500 for companies? Or the Fortune Richest Man list? What about a list of who is the most popular? Where’s the Alexa daily/weekly rankings for actual people?
I’m imagining a website that tracks people’s names on the web — how often the name is mentioned on blogs, news (aggregator), myspace, and the web in general. There could be daily or weekly charts, showing names moving up or down.
Could create a ditto idea, but for music artists/bands (Hype Machine kind of does this, but isn’t storing this reporting) — or for just movies — or for just actors/actresses (celebrities) — or for products, or brand names, etc.
Example:
1. Britney Spears (+300%)
2. Jennifer Aniston (+550%)
3. Michael Arrington
4. Perez Hilton
...
There’s Social Meter, which allows you to check how “social” specific domains are. There’s VidMeter, which tracks the top videos across all the user-generated video websites (YouTube, etc).
Jeremy, I think the “Jeremy Kandah” brand name just went up another 500% today 
Comments
8 Responses to “IDEA #30 - People Meter - Who’s Who Of The World 500 Ranking List”
Got something to say?
Would you want to take into account the context of how the name/term was used? For example a site know to talk about politics might be separated from a site that talks about entertainment news. There is also the issue of good or bad coverage, unless the idea is just to show aggregate coverage.
To do the first part sites might be categorized based upon how they show up in the Open Directory. Not perfect but I trust that categorization more than I do an automated machine analysis. This way the reporting could say, “X went up Y% on Entertainment sites, but went down Z% on Political sites.”
Oddly enough, something like this would probably be popular because it feeds people’s narcissism.
Wayne
It all reminds me of high school, where we had ranks by our grades. But for this, I assume the most attractive men/women would be first, the most successful, then the most unsuccessful.
Aggregate web technologies are kind of the new breed of sites (in my opinion).
Could be a ‘tracker’ for VC’s, CEO’s, … all sorts of defined topic/category niches.
Could you not get a relative sense of this data via Yahoo Buzz?
...
[…] The basic concepts of this idea has to do with XFN relationship linking technologies. This could either be a contest oriented thing, or like Steve Poland talks about over at this post, an ongoing situation that is constantly ranking individuals. […]
follow up:
I think I got about 20+ hits from your site yesterday. Not too crazy I guess.
when MySpace will be publishing “500 most popular profiles” that problem would be solved
We already use that technology over at ... for the celebrity world. You can see who’s hot, cold, and stats about their presence and what’s happening with the users game play activity around those stars.
In addition, another site that does what you were talking about is ...