The Next Big Thing After Diaries: Reviews
By Eloquence , Section Wishlist [] Posted on Fri Dec 15, 2000 at 12:00:00 PM PST
I have raved and ranted a lot about the importance of ratings in the past. While Scoop already does a good job at implementing ratings in story & comment moderation (in spite of its shortcomings), there's ground it does not cover yet: reviews. I have talked about distributed databases for such purposes, but given that nobody will code a sophisticated one in the near future, implementing reviews in Scoop would already be a great step forward. Read on..

Many big players in the dot-com field by now have realized how useful reviews with ratings can be. Take a look at Amazon's book reviews, or at CNET's software reviews. Given the fact that Scoop is primarily for news & discussions, implementing reviews hasn't been a priority so far, but together with diaries it would certainly add further to the "community" aspect of big sites like K5, and allow smaller ones like infoAnarchy to give users an additional feedback channel. Here's how it could work. In the list of sections, you could choose criteria for reviews, for example - usability - graphics - sound Each of these could have a value from 1 to 5, as with the comments. Now in any section that has rating criteria defined, if you post a comment to an article posted in that section, you also get a list of the defined criteria with a dropdown or radio buttons to choose the rating in each category. Scoop would automatically calculate the average of all criteria and print it. There would be several additional options that the site operator could choose for a section that would be configured as a review section: ( ) request section - ( ) collaborative review - ( ) both A section that is classified as "request" doesn't require the submitter to fill in a product/service field on submission. The subject of all replies is empty by default, users enter the name of the product or service they submit here. This type of section is used for asking for a product/service that fills a given need. A "collaborative review" section requires the submitter to give a product/service name, which is used as the default subject. This type of section is used for discussions on a given matter, where it is likely that many users can contribute a review. "both" is self-explanatory, if the field is left blank on submission, it is considered a request. (I think it's better to separate these, to have request-only sections etc.) [ ] Require ratings If not checked, a user can also post a comment without giving ratings. [ ] Require comment If checked, additional to giving numeric ratings for the individual criteria, you also have to explain your review. [ ] Calculate review's average points and show them as [________] (e.g. "Final Score"). This would simply calc the average of an individual review and print it out with the label entered in the textfield. The practical implementation would be left to the site editors. Normally you would have a section called Collaborative Reviews or something like that where all reviews are stored, instead of having them scattered all over the place. This way, it would be easier to reference them later. In the story body, you would introduce the product, link to the site, give background info etc.; generally the body would be smaller than for most stories. Here are some practical examples: Joystick101 posts news about a demo download and everyone can give their rating to it. iA has a release announcement for a new version of pronster, and everyone who gives it a try posts a short review. Next release, new ratings. Users can also comment on the product or write-up without giving a review. Babel.org reports about a Jewish conference and those who have attended give it a rating according to its information value, atmosphere etc., others have normal discussion. Kuro5hin could have a section for users to submit web sites that could be commented and reviewed (perhaps replacing the old MLP). Geeky could have reviews of interesting hardware pieces. Mahonri could have a story asking users to submit reviews of their favorite bible translations. ;-) I don't know how much work it would be, but it would IMHO be the next important thing to add to Scoop after diaries. Then comes the fine-tuning.

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· Scoop · Kuro5hin · importance of ratings · CNET's software reviews · Joystick10 1 · iA · pronster · Babel.org · Kuro5hin [2] · Geeky · Mahonri · More on Feature Requests · Also by Eloquence

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