In a similar vein to my previous concept of developing a better method for finding relevant products based on quality reviews and ratings I have thought of an idea for how to find relevant “conversations” and information that are available on blogs, forums and similar conversation centers.

Currently information can be found through keyword searching, by date, or forum entries with recent comments. But none of these really shows true activity. On a blog, the most recent post or the post with the most comments are not neccessarily the ones that truly have the most qualified activity.

Sometimes a forum post that’s years old will be commented on and rise to the top, a trick that is commonly used to “bump” a post to the top to gain undeserved attention.  Often there are posts on a blog that are heavily trafficed and have many many comments, especially if the post is old.  This commonly leads blogs to not allow comments on old posts.

I recommend that blogs and forums should have an option to sort entries by activity.  Such a sort would take not just the recency or quantity of the comments but would use them together.  A point system could be used to rank posts based on the how recent the last post was along with how recent that comment was to the previous comments along with comments on comments (if that is a feature of the system.)  Other possible ways to add points to a post could be to add a rating system to posts and comments.

How to search for content on a blog or forum that is not just “most comments” or most recently commented (this allows for posts that are extremely old but have a lot of comments from showing up high when the conversation is very spread out and allows for the “bump” issue to not be a problem by allowing posts that are just commented on by the poster to bump it to the top), but is more defined such as most frequently discussed.  By this I mean that finding discussions where the content is weighted by time since posted, and time span between posts.  An algorithm could be created based on the weight to determine a point value for the discussion that would then allow you to see what has the highest frequency.  This would allow you to know which conversations are currently very active.  For example if 75% of the comments are by the creator of the post then each point for the comments are low, but if there are considerable comments by others interspersed between the creators comments (thus illustrating a conversation) then the creators comments are weighted higher since they are adding comments of importance.

I’m sure there are other potential ways to weight posts and comments, but at any rate a system of sorting by activity will allow you to find content that is currently important and has time sensitive relavance which often is quite important in a forum or any sort of social chating environment.