NYT On Online Reputations

prostoalex writes "New York Times analyzes the importance of online postings for the company images and product success/failure rates. Intuit's TurboTax DRM "feature" is mentioned as one of the bad ideas, that was quickly and vociferously opposed by the Internet folk. The movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding got quite a nice cash flow even though the advertising budget was low, but opinions on the Internet regarded the movie highly. Rating systems of Epinions and Slashdot are also discussed briefly."

Comments

A modest proposal...

[Noryungi]

For the Slashdot editors, and others:

What about a system that would let you transfer your "karma" or "reputation" from one site to another?

And, specifically for Slashdot: what about a system that would give you precise stats about the state of your karma, such as the number of negative karma moderation?

Just a suggestion...

Reputations of people, specifically teachers

[dylan95]

Thousands of college students use TeacherReviews.com to influence their decision as to which college classes to take. Some professors complain that they don't think it is fair that their reputation is readily available online for anybody to see (especially when their reviews on TeacherReviews.com is often the first thing Google links to), and there are professors that like it so much that they link their syllabus to the site, even when their reviews aren't so great (so that they can gather more good reviews, I suspect).

Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers

[vegetablespork]

I know of at least one professor who has, um, influenced his rating at Rate My Professor. I'd take any of the scores there with a grain of salt, and carefully read narrative comments, applying a liberal BS factor, to get the true flavor.

Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers

[simong_oz]

I haven't checked out the site, but anyone who chooses their university on the basis of opinions posted on a website deserves everything they get. For something as serious as this ("grading" teachers), the internet is simply too anonymous to be taken on it's merits. For example, who's to say that the teacher/prof themself is not posting opinions? Or somebody with a bone to pick doesn't post lots of bad opinions? What sort of cross-checks are there that the person posting the opinion has ever been taught by that prof? etc etc

It also encourages teachers to teach in the manner that influences their grading (ever see the episode of Malcolm in the Middle where the new teacher institutes a ranking table?), just as exaqms encourage students to memorise what's required to pass a unit rather than learn the material so they know and understand it. But I'll get off my soapbox as I'm starting to go off on a bit of a tangent. :)

And, as is the case with almost every survey that wants opinions, negative opinions will far outweight the positive simply because people rarely bother to comment when the job is well done.

Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers

[jalefkowit]

I can testify from experience that what you describe is exactly the way this sort of thing goes down.

Back in 1995, I was a clueless undergraduate at a university that shall remain nameless. I was helping the student government get its office LAN issues straightened out, and when word got around that I knew my way around a computer they volunteered me to be the one to process the data from those very surveys you mention.

Now, being as it was 1995 and this Web thing was still new and shiny, I had the bright idea that instead of publishing a book with the results, like they did every year (at great expense), they should put up a Web site and let people generate reports from a database instead. After tracking down a few other students who knew way more about the Web than I did, we hacked it all together and launched the puppy in short order -- the first time, as far as we could find out, that any university had provided such data through the Web (anyone have any earlier examples?). A technical triumph.

Not, however, a political one. The faculty union went through the roof when they discovered that anybody on the planet could look up the rating of a given faculty member. They demanded that the site be completely taken down, and that disciplinary action be taken against me and my merry band of miscreant geeks.

In the end, we managed to negotiate a compromise -- the site would be blocked by IP to anyone not on the campus network, and we would get away with a stern talking-to for having the temerity to do something innovative. After I left the project, though, the faculty leaned on the student government types hard enough to convince them to abandon the project altogether.

That experience was what convinced me that I wanted to make a career using Web technologies; I figured that anything that frightened complacent incompetents *that much* was something worth being a part of :-)

Shaping how movies are made, as well

[Patik]

Ang Lee, director of Hulk, was not going to put the main character in purple shorts until he encountered pressure from fans online. The fans threatened to badmouth and boycott the movie if Lee didn't stick to the comic in that regard, so he switched the outfit back.

Moo

[The Terrorists]

How does any digital opinion or rating system incorporate what Donald Rumsfeld called the "unknown unknowns?" From a Web eye view any opinion system is blind to private and noncirculated information, as well as any info that doesnt transfer well onto a digital medium (such as buzzing lights or a bad odor in an office).

Regarding Epinions

[Redking]

They've been around for a while and I think it's great. I still go there to read reviews before I make any purchasing decisions and they also have helpful advice articles written by nominated Experts on different topics like credit card debt or succeeding in college.

Read their history, they've been around since the dotcom boom and are founded by former employees at top technology companies. Unlike other dotcom companies, they've adapted and survived by making tough but sound financial decisions. When I first signed up, each review was awarded 30 cents per view by an Epinions registered visitor, but then people began abusing it. Slowly they've adjusted and lowered the payment rate and have implemented a new reward system.

I'm not surprised that companies are starting to quote Epinions' users regarding their products. They have a well established "Web of Trust" system and top reviewers are entrusted by the general Epinions' public to give objective reviews. Check it out!

Remember E-Mail

[Nice2Cats]

Gagging online sites isn't going to help, because more information is passed on by e-mail than anything else. I have about four friends with whom I regularly mail about new films and DVD releases and what to avoid: Tripple X was one of the films I seem to have saved them from. Unfortunately, they were too late to stop me from going to see 28 Days Later, because I didn't read my e-mail that day. It doesn't have to be negative: I've been recommending Hero left and right. Fight Club was a film I only rented an e-mail discussion.

Another area where e-mail is a killer are computer games: I don't know how many people I have told not to buy Master of Orion III because it is simply a piece of crap that should have been taken out to the back lot of Infogrames (now Atari, I believe) and shot.

Word of mouth is powerful, even if you don't stand on a soap box.

Reducing the importance of advertising?

[banana fiend]

Perhaps not, it's telling that the things that are popular are not microsoft, and a product that was helped was MBFGW.

Rather than this revolutionising the current marketplace, it instead opens up a new one, based around the interests of people who have access to information, and can create their own reviews. So Open Source, and small-budget but high quality productions will do much better than they would in the "real world"

It's only when we have no choice in the matter that "dumbing down occurs" - which alienates a section of the populace that don't benefit from blandness - they turn somewhere else - the internet.

Re:Reducing the importance of advertising?

[the argonaut]

I highly doubt that this will have any real impact on the importance of advertising - it'll just open up new avenues and ways for companies to advertise their wares. For example, for years clothing companies have been hiring the trendsetting kids to be their real-life product placement ads in their local schools, realizing that this is one of the most sure-fire ways to build their "street cred". It has worked fairly well in the chase to capture that lucrative teenage market (a good reference - No Logo by Naomi Klein). What's to stop them from co-opting opinion sites for those same purposes?

Re:Low ad budget??

[nevets]

Being from Upstate-NY, I can confirm that in my area there really wasn't any advertising at all for this movie. So you may be right that the entire budget was spent in your home town! The movie showed only in a small "Arts Theater" and had no mention in the movie megaplex Lowes or Hoyts. The first way I heard about this movie was through the old fashion word-of-mouth. And that came from my father who happens to golf with the over 65 crowd (he himself is in that crowd too), and they all were talking about how good this movie was. I finally went to see it when a coworker of mine saw it and liked it.

So here's one instance that we were not bombarded with trailers.

They sure let Intuit off the hook easy...

[weave]

Sucky article mention of intuit....

1. Intuit installs crappy copy protection
2. Users bitch. A small number of paranoid ones claim Intuit is spying on them
3. Intuit quickly handles situation and assures everyone it's not spying on them.
4. Everyone is happy

Not how I remember it. No mention of the scribbling crap into your boot block or inability to install into vmware machines, etc, etc...

I switched to Tax Cut.

Re:NYT On Online Reputations?

[alister667]

Does anyone rememeber the poor clod who had his reputation both on-line and off-line (allegedly) ruined by the aformentioned NYT?

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/2 0/ 2030201&mode=flat&tid=127&tid=186&tid= 209

Was this, by any chance, mentioned in their article?

And brace yourself for a major bloom of astroturf

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Of course, a really gutsy, ethical company wants you to know the truth about their products, and enjoys the enhanced word of mouth the Internet provides, because perhaps they can save some money on advertising.

Of course and UNethical company - which may be a requriement for a PR firm - will simply put one or two people to work posting through pseudonyms to create the illusion of a vast population of enthusiastic supporters. (Like the paid endorsements and fake man-on-the-street interviews in commercials and political ads, written large on the internet.)

The term of art is "Astroturf" - for phoney grass-roots.

And after the NYT article you can expect a sudden wash of it, polluting the net as a reputationg system for some time to come.

Re:Googlewashing, PageRank and Online reputation..

[GMontag]

Yea, real hard to find info on that, took me all of 2 seconds. Nope, it is not the NYT article, but you could pay to access the NYT archive and get the original.

When Googling second-superpower we now get articles about your famed "googlewash effect" that whine endlessly about people not using the "Official anti-war Sanctioned Definition by of second-superpower".

I really fail to see the point of this complaint, unless it is an effort by a handful of people to control the language, then I see it quite well. Yes, it is Orwellian and the Orwellians wishing to control the language are the ones bringing up Orwell the most!

There is a different paralell to be found in the book from whence my handle came. A popular grass-roots movement demanding the government censor everything under the sun and a homogonized language. Perhaps this is what you want, but none for me thank you

Amazon

[pommiekiwifruit]

I saw a book on amazon that was in an interesting subject area and was rated five stars "the best technical book I have ever read".

When I saw a copy in the bookshop and glanced through it, it was bulked out with badly written C code and didn't have nearly enough theory, and in one place seemed to lack the courage for an ambitious feature.

So now this makes me wonder how so many books get high ratings. The denizens of comp.lang.c++ might disagree with Herb Schilt getting 4.5 stars for his C++ books also.

Re:Amazon

[swordgeek]

Agreed, in a general sense. (I'm not a programmer, don't know about C books at all.)

The secret is that people tend to push their opinions to the extreme. If they like something, they love it. If they dislike something, they're offended at the wasted time.

If someone finds a book rotten, you can read about it at the bottom of the reviews at Amazon, or wherever. I always read these reviews, even though many of them are along the lines of, "THIS BOOK SUX0RS!!!" OR "I HATED ITS BAD LANGANGE AND IT WASNT VERY FUNNY AT ALL EVEN THO OTHER PEOPLES SAID IT WAS FUNNY." (For a fiction book, one hopes :-) Similarly, if they find a book good, it often gets glowing reviews. "FANTASTIC book--the best on programming HTML from a braille terminal ever written!!!!!!!"

The key is to read the thoughtful reviews, which are _often_ the 2-4 (out of 5) star reviews. There are very few technical books which actually deserve a five-star rating, and people who critically read a book will usually find some weaknesses. Similarly, it's hard to get published a book that has no useful information whatsoever. Even a one-star review doesn't mean that the book is utterly useless--just that the bad outweighs the good so heavily that you should stay AWAY!

Ultimately I find very little value in average ratings on Amazon or anywhere else. Everything between decent and brilliant averages around 4-4.5 stars, whereas everything from awful to mediocre gets about 3-3.5 stars. Reading the individual reviews is where the information becomes useful.

(As an aside, I only see two technical books in my collection which deserve five stars: "Unix in a Nutshell," and "Unix System Administration Handbook." Even K&R, wonderful as it is, has its faults.)

You know what this means...

[Burlynerd]

As this "online reputation" concept is realized by big business, more postings will be made by online employees of these businesses. We are spoiled right now by the relatively low number of paid commentators on the Internet. The future will probably include various companies' paid posters battling each other on a scale to rival the spam phenomenon. The more that companies think we can influence their sales... the more they will try to influence the postings on the Internet.

yes, i suppose i am

[ed.han]

fireboy:

you make some good points. i have a few thoughts:

1. even though the same code may be in use, the implementation within each distinct site may very well vary and possibly enough to render an apples: apples comparison irrelevant.

2. agreed, but this is again (IMHO) an implementation issue. all of which is to say (unclear from your response whether you're conceding this point or not): results from site to site cannot be compared apples: apples fashion, which (it would seem to me) would be the real objective of any such system, no?

3. i've worked with databases. that doesn't scare me. what does scare me is the probability of reconciliation amongst the various servers. let me explain: perhaps i'm not being clear.

let's say that 25 site operators put their heads together and thrash out a standard whereby this data is maintained in a nice, decentralized fashion. so who owns that standard? and at some point, wouldn't micro$oft or someone else like them come along and "embrace & extend" this new standard, thereby leading to the balkanization i've described? perhaps i'm not understanding your point correctly, which i confess is entirely possible, as i'm insufficiently caffeinated?

ed