OneJerusalem.com

Social Rank is a fascinating web venture, launched by Indonesian company MindValley. The company created an algorithm that scouts the web for interesting blogs, ranks them according to relevance and popularity, and features them on theme-centered portals.

For example, Journalism Daily centers top journalism-related blogs, while The Comic Watch is a blogging hub for comic strips lovers.

Each portal has its own team of volunteers that nominate a bunch of community-leading blogs within the designated domain. Once an initial list of related blogs has been chosen, the Social Rank crawlers follow the links from these blogs to other domain-specific blogs and add them to the pool as well. Then the algorithm begins to assign these blogs — and the individual posts within these blogs — an SR (Social Rank) score, in a similar manner to how Google assigns each web page with a PR (Page Rank) score.

Israeli people, and Jewish people abroad, publish a vast range of stimulating and engaging blogs. This is why Social Rank designed a distinct portal specifically for Israel’s hottest blogs. It is called “Israel’s Daily Voices”, and One Jerusalem succeeds regularly in gaining a top position with their listings.

The web site is still in Beta phase, and sometimes the pages do not load properly. Nevertheless, I find it to be very useful and user-friendly, and it has helped me to discover other Israeli blogs which I enjoy reading, such as Dry Bones.