eri on the interweb

I have been following Margaret and David for some years now so I know the difference between a 3 star movie rating and a 3 ½ star movie rating. Generally though, ratings on web sites can seem fairly spurious unless the audience has some critical mass.

I just watched a video on TED (which I would heartily recommend) and rated it. I expected to indicate my rating by interacting with 5 blank stars. Instead I was presented with a list of words to select from, after which I saw a tag cloud rating. This is such a lovely twist on ratings, and a smart use of tag clouds. Watch the video and check out the ratings mechanism. The rules are that “you can choose 3 words, or vote for the same word 3 times“. Voting for the same word 3 times gives the user a chance to get their opinion across emphatically; and limiting the choice to 3 words keeps the rating meaningful.

tag cloud generated by wordle for my abandoned delicious account

Yesterday I discovered a great online tool, or thought I had. Coming across the site I went to add it to my Delicious bookmarks—but I had already added the site in 2006!

My first attempt at Delicious (illustrated above in a wordle cloud) slowly and surely got out of control. My tagging was too granular, too specific. The tag lists became meaningless with too many tags listing only one or two sites. This is not how I wanted Delicious to work for me. So I started again. My new tagging strategy was to keep the tags as generic as possible. Now I actually refer to my bookmarks a lot more. My tags are really lists; directories of interests, resources, inspirations, a shopping wish list, and of course my reading list.

tag cloud generated by wordle for my Delicious links