Ping.sg is a constantly updating community meta blog, i.e. you can read the blogs of every participating blogger in one place. How it works is a blogger writes an entry on his blog, pings the server and gets his post (title & excerpt) published on the website. An article gets a “pong” or a vote whenever someone clicks to read, and the 10 articles with the most “pongs” get additional exposure at the top of page. Having joined Ping.sg less than a week ago, I think it’s a very clever concept and definitely a brilliant effort considering that it’s conceptualized, developed and operated by an individual, Chua U-Zyn (Computer Engineering undergrad, NUS). If I had to describe Ping.sg in 3 words it would be addictive, useful and can-be-improved. ;) 1) Addictive because I’ve been logging in everyday (sometimes a couple of times a day) so that I can conveniently read everyone’s blog and catch up on what’s happening in Singapore. 2) Useful because it could be a good marketing platform if you had something useful for the community, are able to craft attractive titles and generate enough pongs to get into the Most Popular list. 3) Can-Be-Improved because one can easily cheat into getting to the Most Popular list by using the many anonymous web proxies on the Internet. Maybe this can be solved by setting clicks from only registered members to count as a pong, and limited to 1 pong per user per article? Btw, I’m curious about the daily number of visitors that Ping.sg gets because there seems to be a low number of pongs per article. Anyone care to give a guess?
I think they do check ur ip address or something. If you click a ping more than once, it will still register as 1 pong.
Well, if people want to cheat, we also can’t do much. But end of the day, u’ll know who is cheating if you see boring post from the same person keep becoming the popular post.
Comment by DK — April 2, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
As for daily hits even though we’ve got a surge in visitors and members (including me), but it isn’t exactly enjoying the same viewership as Tomorrow or something. I’ll say the pongs are a decent enough estimation of traffic.
Comment by Farinelli — April 2, 2007 @ 6:52 pm
It is always the same few bloggers picking stuff from elsewhere, especially http://cwkhang.blogspot.com. So why bother? I know I don’t.
Comment by kormmandos — April 3, 2007 @ 11:49 am
Hi, only a registered user who has first logged on and then clicks on a link will deliver a ‘pong’. Otherwise it’s just a ‘unique read’… and even then, we’ve noticed that the ‘unique reads’ are not showing up on the analytics on our own blog.
We’ve actually asked Ping about it; they have no real explanation except to say they are sending the traffic right through to your sites (there’s no cache or anything like that).
As for Tomorrow: we’ve submitted twice to Tomorrow and so far we’ve not received a single visitor from Tomorrow. Bit disappointing…
Comment by cloudsters — July 19, 2008 @ 2:14 pm
cloudsters: this is a very old post, which was done when pongs were calculated for every click, regardless of whether it was by a registered user or not.
Weird but I think I know why. See, the clicks are redirected through ping.sg hence your Analytics will consider all the “visits” to come from there (read: same IP address).
Since many “visits” within the same session (30-minute period) from the same IP address are considered as “one visit”, and the fact that your pongs are usually within that short span until your link gets displaced to the second page, it’s not suprising that the numbers on ping.sg and Analytics don’t tally.
Submitting is one thing. Actually getting your post approved and published is another. ;)
Comment by Larry — July 19, 2008 @ 2:40 pm