Hot Team: Social Ratings
Social rating systems allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of resources and rank items within a collection.
Social rating via Pligg
In fall 2007, a hot team explored the concept of social ratings for content. The team looked at a couple of approaches and worked to expose some interesting use cases. Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g., books, blog posts, Broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc.). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to use the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty wish to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface.
Download the Social Rating Hot Team White Paper (PDF).
