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.

I have never noticed this feature before, but it was part of the 2007 site launch (TED was designed by Method who have a short case study on the project). Funnily enough, while writing this post I went to take a screen shot of YouTube’s rating system only to find that they have changed how they do things. YouTube have forsaken the 5 star rating metaphor for a simple Like/Dislike mechanism.

Techcrunch wrote a short piece on the ratings subject after YouTube opened up the dialogue with its users about the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the 5 star rating system, in its September 22, 2009 post Five Stars Dominate Ratings. YouTube’s Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman explained the predominant trend was for users to prescribe either a 1 star or 5 star rating. Clearly this has lead to the design decision to offer 2 choices. There is a good discussion (19 March 2010) about the YouTube rating redesign on IXDA.

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

I come across so many blogs where the authors litter their posts with tags. Its keyword spam to me and often a misrepresentation of the blog post (or image, or video) because the tags don’t represent the content equally. A passing mention to something becomes equivalent to the main theme of the post in the tags. This is not to say that tags shouldn’t be used, but if the ultimate aim is to offer a navigation device to related content they should be used carefully.