What's my Secret Method?
SCN contributor otto.gold2/blog raised the topic of "the magic formula of quality" and wanted to unveil the secret equation behind calculating blog points in his blog: The specified item was not found.
He also challenged me to document my own clandestine and previous unknown and unpublished technique for granting members their blog schwag or in simple language: how the heck we determine blog point allocation.
I won't bore you by repeating my answer to Otto in the comments to his blog. They can be found here by clicking Assigning value, creating value. I also need to commend Tobias Hofmann for jumping into the fray.
But I did want to provide Otto with what he asked for : namely the opinions of various community members on the topic of ratings and searching for quality content.
As I started to rack my brain to remember what folks like Introduction to Knowledge Exploitation, jim.spath/blog, jon.reed/blog, dennis.howlett2/blogtobias.hofmann/blog, Jelena Perfiljeva, The specified item was not found., Congratulations to the current Topic Leaders (2009-2010), Meet David Branan Community Support Angel and others had to say about the topic during SAP Inside Track in NSQ I remembered that I had filmed some of the conversation.
So I edited three segments which feature comments from the above participants.
Some of the salient points I remembered were that Jim Spath reminded us that to date ratings on SCN only exist on formal content such as articles and rich media. Jon Reed spoke about how Google avoids the questions of rating by looking at links to content and Trevor pointed out the quality risks with a highly commercial "pay for exposure" site like Google. Greg Myers spoke of something that is close to my formula when he said that amount and type of comments that generate a healthy conversation and knowledge exchange = good post. (aha! a formula)
Yesterday in the hallways of an SAP office I bumped into Trevor and continued to speak to him about the values of rating types. We spoke at length about the move toward "like" as a way for people to express interest and of course the general consensus during these discussions during Inside Track were that comments are really an essential part of evaluating content.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three - This one features David Branan!
Dennis Howlett reminded participants that YouTube ditched the rating system. No more stars: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/21/new-youtube/
But there were many comments from the attendees that having thumbs up and thumbs down wasn't a great idea either: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/video-page-gets-makeover.html
Many people seem to favor the facebook "like" approach though and this was something explored in the conversation with Trevor.
Otto wanted some kind of road map to our future way of handling content evaluation. I can broadly hint that it will most probably include like features, comments and the possiblity of rating (although after reviewing these contents it seems that many folks are not strongly in favor of a "5 star rating process".
What do you think?
