I’m making an RSS reader and I’m at the point where I am receiving articles from multiple sources. I’m also retrieving the Facebook likes to determine popularity but I’m seeing some feeds that have a huge amount of votes and others with very few. Now if I’ve subscribed to a feed even if it has a few votes I’m obviously interested in it. I’m not sure what the best way to determine the order of the articles displayed. My plan was to list the most voted at the top and the least voted at the bottom that drowns out news sources that aren’t voted by the masses but that I enjoy like Joystiq. What I’ve been thinking lately is to give all the news sources equal weighting so the most voted article of each news source will be displayed first and then the second best voted articles will follow those and so on. I would like to know is there a better way of determining a news source’s popularity weighting instead of just giving them equal weighting?
Edit: grammar
If I were doing it, I think I’d probably start by computing a moving average of the number of “likes” for each source. Then compute the percentage difference between the number of likes for a particular article compared to the moving average for that source.
In the long term, this should give roughly the same distribution as giving equal weight to every source, but it still allows (for example) two particularly well-liked articles from a single source to show up as the top two articles in the list.