Sunday, November 27, 2005, 4:56:25 PM, Randolfe Wicker wrote: > It is not the actual "star rating" that is revealing on Amazon. > It is the text accompanying the rating. Someone might give a book a > "one-star" rating and in writing about the book say something like > "exposes like this one on the high rate of theft in Columbia do a > disservice to the country." > > So, if you are planning to take a trip to Columbia, you would > take that "One-star" rating as a good reason to buy the book so as > to be aware of the dangers lurking for tourists.
But that's my point. If the usefulness of the star rating of a book, video, gadget or whatever ranges from "ignorable" to "deceptive", why bother with it at all? If there were just a bundle of reviews, maybe with tags to group/sort by, wouldn't that be at least equally effective? Sunday, November 27, 2005, 5:12:43 PM, Joshua Kinberg wrote: > Its also the fact that you can rate the reviewer and let other users > know that you found the review helpful or not. This type of feedback > promotes trust in the system. People who are considered good reviewers > rise to the top of the reviews. This, on the other hand is a much more effective use of a rating system. The implied "axis" of the rating is the accuracy of the review. Both the person assigning the rating and the person reading it have similar expectations. I'm still thinking about what I might consider an ideal rating system. At the moment, I think it might be something akin to tagging (so you can mark the "axis" of a rating with an arbitrrary keyword/phrase) and probably be _relative_ rather than _absolute_. Each reviewer should be able to add as many of these "ratings" as they feel the item needs. So I would hope to be able to say stuff like "this video is funnier than that one", or "the sound quality was worse than that other one". in some kind of machine-readable format. This should allow review authors to say exactly what they mean, and also allow review readers to sort/group by the factors they are actually interested in. Thoughts? -- Frank Carver http://www.makevideo.org.uk ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/lBLqlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
