When I first began this blog my day job was marketing web software, and I was obsessed with figuring out how to make ideas more likely to spread across the web.  Though part of the reason for blogging was long tail self-expression, much of it was about building my professional chops.  I’m a big fan of knowing by doing.

I’m no longer making my dough as a web marketer, but I’m still fascinated by the mechanisms of thought contagion on the web and elsewhere.  I love sifting through web logs to see who is visiting and linking to metacool.

Imagine my delight earlier this week when PubSub indicated that metacool was the 14th strongest website out there (out of 16 million sites tracked!!) in terms of link strength and buzz.  Sure, I’m happy to be up in the quantitative ranking, but really turns me on is the prospect of figuring out what makes PubSub tick as a measure of contagion.  To that end, I need your help:

1. If you have any sense of how PubSub derives its rankings, leave a comment or drop me a line.
2. If you know of any other online measures of contagion (besides Google page rank), please tell me about them.

Thought contagion is so cool, eh?