Slashdot Mirror
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."
Thanks for the link to Slashdot or I may have never found it.
Now that's irony. (registration required)
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...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Considering that a NYT article on second-superpower got outranked into oblivion by Googlewashing in just 42 days, online reputation is tough to achieve, even over a short period. Secondly, most online opinions are always critical, and outnumber 'shills' hands down.
Try getting your hands on an article on Microsoft and Schnazzle using Google and you can see Online Reputation at work!
And on the lighter side: Karma - Excellent; Reputation - Whore!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
As I'm sure the NY Times is aware of.... http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/922499.asp
The article mentions that online reviews and word of mouth are reducing the effectiveness of advertising. Advertising is what the compnay *wants* you to know about their products. 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.
There have already been reports about gag orders over product criticism. I wonder when the alarm bells began ringing in the advertising industry, and how their response will develop. (Astroturfing Slashdot?)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
New York Times on reputation..... ouch.
Fuck it
I happily continue to buy movies, music, and Blizzard games to this day because in the end, when you get through all the griping, they're quality products. What's the alternative? But if you looked at the amount of complaints online you'd think these industries had been run into the ground by upset consumers.
I'd buy from the nice companies, but they've been run into the ground by pirates.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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).
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.
The New York Times issued a correction for their story on online reputations. It turns out the author has never been on the Internet and does not own a computer. Also, the reference to Amazon books was incorrect; Amazon actually is a the remnants of a forest, not an online bookseller. There is no such web site site as Slashdot.
The New York Times regrets the error.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding got quite a nice cash flow even though the advertising budget was low
:) I didn't even know anything about Vardalos until after the movie had premiered; until that point I just figured this was the latest 'Hottest Romantic Comedy of the Year!' to be placed on the hype-mobile.
I live in Winnipeg (where Nia Vardalos is from, originaly, and yes, that's in Canada). I think they spent their entire advertising budget in my city alone, if the above quote is accurate.
I'm enough of a movie buff that I see about 2-3 movies in theatres a week, and let me tell you: 6 *months* before MBFGW was released, I was seeing trailers for it every few weeks. The month before it came out, the onslaught started. Every single movie I went to had a trailer for it, and I do mean *every*. During its run here, ditto. Of course, I could somewhat ignore this, until the TV campaign started in about 2 weeks before it premiered. Suddenly everyone I knew was talking about how 'good' this movie looked, well before seeing it. By the time it actually was making any money in theatres, very few people I knew hadn't yet heard of it (hell, even my parents were asking what all the fuss was about, and it's been several years since they've seen a new movie).
In a city like Winnipeg, all they had to do was mention once or twice that a film created and starred in by a 'Pegger was coming out, and the local media would have done all the free promotion they needed. Instead, we were bombarded with more trailers than I saw for Spider-Man and LOTR:TT combined, and yes, that's a lot
Maybe the rest of the world was spared from this, but up here it was insane. Then again, maybe a 'low advertising budget' just means no superbowl commercial these days.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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!
Rangers Lead the Way!
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.
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.
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
With as much as Slashdot bashes Microsoft, It's sure to crumble to the weight of our online opinions any minute! ...
Any minute now...
http://use.perl.org
Your example reveals a problem with reputation-based systems: who is assigning reputation.
This was obvious to me this weekend, when I went to a food flavor contest, and the items that won popular vote were the most bland and boring in every category.
The problem with reputation systems--including Slashdot--is that your reputation can be based on the opinions of individuals who are not necessarily the best for assigning reputations. They may be unknowledgable, unduly biased, etc.
In the case of classes, this gets to be a problem because students don't always like material that's necessary for them to learn. This has become painfully obvious to me as a university statistics instructor. I lecture in a department where statistics is required, but not the primary focus of the undergraduate major. My ratings tend to be good, but stats class ratings tend to be much lower than that of other classes on average, simply because the students don't want to be taking statistics. There are plenty of times when, in order to learn, the students must do something they might not want to do or not see reasons for at the time.
And so it goes for things like food flavors, movies, music, Slashdot topics, and so forth. Even within fields you see this: the majority is not always best. Popular opinion is not always the best index of quality, just what's popular. Many of us see this on Slashdot, I'm sure--a certain opinion being reinforced because it's majority, not because it's informed or insightful.
This isn't a new phenomenon of course--it's something people have wrestled with since the dawn of man, I'm sure--but it seems to have become more salient to me recently. It has become especially relevant with popular anti-critical-establishment inclinations in many domains of culture, such as music and movies, and also in online social sorting mechanisms such as Slashdot.
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.
while that's an interesting concept, it seems impracticable, for several reasons:
1. most sites don't use a comparable method to rate karma. the slashdot staff describes how the karma system was homegrown in the article, and i'm sure that's true of each site's analogous feature.
2. even if these systems used some kind of standard rating system for users, i strongly suspect that user behavior and reliability might vary from site to site. f'rex: i'm not really an IT guy, which shows in the comments i make. however, i'm a serious movie fiend. accordingly, users here should not necessarily take my thoughts on technology matters, but i can speak w/ much greater authority on IMDB.
3. let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all the various sites whose user opinions are well regarded (slashdot, et al) agree to develop a method such as you propose. there would still be 2 separate and mutually exclusive methods: either a highly decentralized method (likely to be the favored tool here) or a highly centralized method. naturally, the latter would be susceptible to exploits, etc., and the interested site operators would therefore split into (at least) 2 camps, thereby rendering the universal solution impossible, IMHO.
ed
I remember long time ago there was a ./ story that was
basically an advertisement for a product called FreeVeracity.
The product is dead now ...
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
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.
I hope that those e-commerce sites won't abuse the online fora, to increase their own sales etc, by word of mouse, as this article calls it.
:)
Because I think that would lead to a downfall of the quality of those services, and they would cut themselves in the fingers.
btw, on a side note, I find this quote rather funny:
"I think that, now, the power of the Internet is captured in the ability of everyday Americans to give their opinion on any product or event that they want," Mr. Gulbransen said.
As if no other inhabitant of other countries in the world uses the internet to express their opinions about certain products.
Of course I realise that this is an American Newspaper, read mostly by Americans, but still, its content is on the global internet
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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