Re: [syndication] More Ratings stuff

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

In article <000d01c0913e$75ad85c0$070d0dc0@monster>, Jeff Barr
<jeff@vertexdev.com> writes
>To me, the biggest question is architectural. Where in "the cloud" do
>the ratings accumulate? From the point of view of a client, I need
>to know where to send a rating, and where to get one. It seems that
>we do not want to have a central site. However, I do not see a way
>around this without some sort of multicast model.

Run the scenario.

Let's say I run a News/Rating Aggregator, "Julian's Geek News Picks". I
pick up the 200 or so key RSS syndicators in the geek field, once an
hour. I'll categorize the output and present a combo Hot News page. Each
item has a 0-9 Rating combo and button next to them. My editorial team,
along with all my users, just love going "0"-click against anything that
mentions Larry and 9-Click for anything about XML-RPC or the Grateful
Dead. This gets fed back into the system so that my top 10 "MUST READ"
page is XML-RPC stories interspersed every so often with an article from
John Perry Barlow, and there's never any mention of Oracle.

On the hour, I publish an RSS1.1 file for the top 100 rated stories with
their current average rating. Current top of the heap is a Scripting
News Daily at 8.91 (from 2001 rating hits) that manages to mention XML-
RPC, Blues for Allah and Mr Barlow all in one story.

Meanwhile, SlashGeek.biz, my arch rival, has been doing the same thing
but on a slightly different mix of RSS feeds and stories. Their rating
for Dave's page was only 6.2 (150 hits) because they're Metallica fans.
They give my ratings a bias because they know what we're like. The link
ends up on their site with a rating of 7.5 (number 7 in their Top 25
list) after applying their own arcane formulae.

SlashGeek.Biz has been buying lunch for journalists and they're "Rock
the SOMA" event got them a write up in Wired, so they're right up there
in the spotlight. The magazine "Reality 2.0" routinely runs the top 10
from SlashGeek's RSS feed on the magazine's home page. Unfortunately,
Reality2's readers think XML is doomed because there are "500 versions
of it" and they think "The Dead" is a song by Moby. Nobody clicks on
Dave's page and if they do, they give it a 2.

Reality2's RSS1.1 feed is a staple of Moreover. Amazingly, the only
stories rated by them, are their own and they all get a 9. This has
happened so much that nobody trusts Moreover's aggregated ratings any
more.

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Enough pyrotechnics. To answer your question "Where do I send a rating?"
the answer is wherever you got the story from. Or perhaps anywhere that
will accept it. Within the context of the list it will make complete
sense. The ratings don't necessarily accumulate anywhere except via
emergent behaviour.

And who can guess where that will lead.

-- 
Julian Bond mail:julian@netmarketseurope.com
workurl:http://www.netmarketseurope.com
weblog:http://roguemoon.manilasites.com
ICQ:33679668 Tel:+44 (0)20 7420 4363
tag: So many words, so little time