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December 17, 2003

What is a Flappy Bird

There have been a couple of emails and a comment about what a 'Flappy Bird' might be and what the heck that has to do with prizes and so forth. There is a blog "game" called the The Blogosphere Ecosystem which is run by Mr NZ Bear. It contains a number of categories based on evolutionary stages (in order from highest to lowest) which are:


Higher Beings
Mortal Humans
Playful Primates
Large Mammals
Marauding Marsupials
Adorable Rodents
Flappy Birds
Slithering Reptiles
Crawly Amphibians
Flippery Fish
Slimy Molluscs
Lowly Insects
Crunchy Crustaceans
Wiggly Worms
Multicellular Microorganisms
Insignificant Microbes

A new blog is registered in the game and starts off as an Insignificant Microbe. On a periodic basis the blog is checked for incoming and outgoing links. Due to a recent change, these links must be unique (i.e. linking to a single post 10 times doesn't help). The total number of unique links that point to you are like votes. The more votes you get, the higher you go. At the highest levels the cut-off point between categories appears to be based on the number of entrants, at lower levels it is based on the number of links only. The top category (Higher Beings) has the top 10 blogs (current cut-off is 922 votes), the next category has 20 blogs (current cut-off is 546), then Playful Primate has 70 blogs (current cut-off is 278). A flappy bird has between 32 and 44 votes (AFAIK).

You can check on your votes by finding your blog in the Ecosystem (for my blog there is a link over on the right). I currently have 34 inbound unique links (and Busy Mom the blog that beat me is now a Marsupial with 65 links). Things that a blogger can do to help other bloggers include having more entries on your main page, maintaining a blogroll, putting trackbacks / comments on the main page (only the main page is scanned).

Some of the weblog awards this year were awarded in categories based on the ecosystem. Hence I was being compared with blogs that should have (all other things being equal) a similar number of readers and a similar level of popularity. That means even small blogs had a chance to win an award....

Hope that explains it all....

Posted by Ozguru at December 17, 2003 07:12 AM

Comments

I stand edumacated!

Posted by: The Gray Monk at December 17, 2003 07:12 AM

What you forgot Pickled Pig's Foot and Frosted Toaster Pastry and of course Succulent Prime Rib.

Posted by: Tiger at December 17, 2003 07:12 AM

Tiger: You are absolutely right. I will need to revise the list. Now let me see.... I think a "Pickled Pig's Foot" ranks higher than a "Large Mammal" but I am not sure about the other two. It is good to see that the blog competition helped you raise a rank because I think I voted for you as a Large Mammal :-)

Posted by: ozguru at December 17, 2003 07:12 AM