Outbrain - Aggregating the Rating of Blog Posts

Blog Recommendation Startup Outbrain Raises $5 Million

Rate your favorite blog posts, then get recommendations from Outbrain about other posts that people like you also liked.

McCain New York Times scandal a goldmine

If you think about it, this whole situation is a win-win for McCain. The base consolidates behind him because they hate the New York Times more than they could possibly hate a liberal Republican. There is suddenly a new and effective rallying cry to induce McCain supporters to donate.

It's so perfect, you have to wonder if there are some people on his campaign who wished they'd engineered it.

"In other news, the McCain campaign says the fundraising email sent out yesterday that described the New York Times story as a 'smear campaign' was its most successful fundraising email to date, but the campaign declined to say how much it raised.

Senior adviser Steve Schmidt said in response to questions, 'There was a lot of outrage across the country on the story and the campaign has raised a lot of money in the last 24 hours.'"

MSNBC.com

Are you more like most people? Or are you more like people who are more like you?

I had yet another conversation today about the importance of opinion leaders in the entertainment industry. As a matter of background, it is my fervernt belief that push TV entertainment is dying a quick death before our very eyes (too bad the writers strike is over...) and that video delivered via the Internet is the future of entertainment. The versatility, variety, cost, and interactive possibilities of video via the web is so potentially great as to make television as we know it look about as entertaining as an evening in front of the Victrola. Any content in any format delivered to you at any time, probably for free in exchange for advertising shown along side and product placement integrated into the content.

The one problem I hear short-sited naysayers come up with for this scenario is "people want to be able to turn on the TV and have something playing" and "how are people going to know what to watch?" Enter opinion leaders. These people are already prominent in all of our lives -- they are the first-adopter friends that buy everything first, they see all the movies you want to see before you do, and they are the people you consult when you want advice; in this case on entertainment.

Don't want to bother your buddy on a Friday night when you are trying to decide what to take in via on-demand video? The answer is simple. Consult an opinion leader that you have created.

Coming back to my conversation today, a friend recommended metacritic.com to me as a great place to check reviews of media, particularly movies. It seems metacritic takes reviews from multiple sources (established movie critics from newspapers and magazines), gets rankings from them, averages them out, and displays the averages for the benefit of their users. So, for any given movie, 35 reviews could be averaged together to provide a score out of 100 that represents the average how industry reviewers feel about the film. This represents a very educated and thorough look at media -- through the eyes of the media critic establishment.

Another model of content rating aggregation many are familiar with is the Netflix system. I'm not intimately familiar with it, but at first blush it appears that once you wade into a genre that their suggestions are based on what they know about what you like. Like a documentary about Zebras? Here's 4 more that should pique your interest. Handy, but hardly personal. Plus it requires an exhaustive knowledge of media by the host.

Instead, ask yourself the question, "Who am I more like? Everybody else? Or everybody else who is like me?"

Pop music is what is it because more people like it than not. It's generally agreeable to the masses, but often the more discerning among us find that our personal tastes deviate from the common "popular" taste significantly.

What are we discerning consumers to do? Easy. Create meta-opinion leaders from collections of like-minded consumers whose tastes mirror your own. Sites like metacritic have already taken the first step by aggregating opinions into ratings. The key here is that my tastes aren't going to coincide with that of the film reviewer for the New York Times (God help us) very often, nor for that matter any of the other establishment reviewers, if for no other reason than the fact that I don't review movies for a living (or even a hobby).

Why limit the reviewing universe? Fling wide the doors of user generated content, let anyone review, and provide relevant metrics to show people who the most prolific reviewers are for reference. Couple that with an easy search mechanism to let users find reviews on media they already have strong opinions about. Finish with a system whereby you can pick and choose the reviewers that most often mirror your own opinions, and combine them all into your very own customized personal opinion leader. The process could be streamlined at the outset by guiding users through a process where they identify their favorite content in multiple genres and identify other users whose tastes mirror their own. Obviously the more prolific a reviewer the better chances they have of becoming an opinion leader, but ultimately there is no subsitute for identifying commonality with a fellow consumer and leveraging their experience to enrich your own.

What you end up with is an automated ranking system that tells you how your collection of like-minded people rate a particular piece of content. The rating could be waited according to how much you identify with each person either in general or on an ongoing basis based on your post consumption feedback about the content in question. These collections of people could take on a life of their own, and even be aggregated and combined into other meta-opinion leaders. (e.g. My ranking system includes Matt's sci-fi collective, Erin's romantic commedy group, and my own esoteric bunch of indie film nuts)

At the end of the day, I think the point here is that opinion leaders are only as useful as they are relevant. In the long term then, what is more relevant -- the opinions of a single person, or the collective, weighted opinions of a larger group of pre-vetted, like minded individuals?

In-game micro-transactions as involvement devices?

Could the in-game micro-transaction model be applied to non-game websites as way to draw donation money out of users without hitting them up for money? It seems as though a game type model would have to be employed to encourage people to participate in systems that accrued rank, badges, points, etc, and had tangible payoffs for investments of time and money.

TwoFish Announces Micro-Transaction Engine for Games

I wonder if this could also be translated into a user immersion strategy for campaign or other donation driven websites. The question is, what do you hold out as the carrot to site users in a non-game environment? Pay for content models have been tried with limited success. Would you have to create a game like experience and community in order to facilitate a pay as you browse model?

Here's my next phone

Google's answer to the iPhone is unveiled - Telegraph