I haven't been able to post for the past few days. I received the edited manuscript of my book back from my publisher and have been going through it and approving/making the changes they suggested. They've given me a tight deadline, so I've been working away at that. But once this is done, I'm totally finished with the book.
Anyway, on a different topic, my friend Dave (who writes software) asked me to link to his new site, and I promised I would. His site is called
we rank. It uses the same software I use to run this site (Expression Engine), but he's trying to adapt it to allow people to rank comments and posts. He's looking for feedback on this experiment. (My feedback: it's a little confusing, Dave.) I'm not sure I'd want people to rank posts and comments on this site, but he has a few other ideas for changing the software that I might try out, if he gets them worked out.
Comments
Not that I'm entirely sure what Dave is talking about...
What Dave is talking about:
There are other sites that gather information from members about the quality of what other members post. For example, e-thepeople allows members to encourage or discourage each comment. Everything2 allows members to vote a post up or down. I really like the idea because it allows quality posts to get promoted without reflecting the bias of the site creator. I think I've found a method that's even better than what those sites are using. I just suck at user interfaces, so I was hoping some museumofhoax enthusiasts might be interested in it.I'm still confused about the whole business, though.
Then will you be able to rank the rankings that other readers have posted?
I think this is what the postmodernists mean by "metatext."
Am I right?
With posts, however, I think it can work much better. My latest idea is that you would have to be looking at a particular category to submit a vote. So suppose you're looking at Politics. You would build your list from the existing posts in Politics putting those you like more above those you like less.
Someone guessed that this allows people to "know who are popular posters and who are complete morons nobody likes." Ranking posts won't do that, but ranking members would, and I'm working on that now. Ranking posts at the Museum of Hoaxes is kind of pointless because they're all pretty decent, but when you have a large group of people creating posts, it would be nice for readers to be able to help sort the better stuff from the worse stuff.
Dave.
It looks like what the group effort at digg decides is whether or not a story shows up. We-Rank just changes the order so that a better post will drop off the front page after a worse post, regardless which was created first.
Dave.
People have been making the mistake of replacing human individuality with the anonymity of machines since the dawning of the computer age. They've also been making the mistake of one-rule-for-all (the basis of government). Homosexuals find gay marriage to be an excellent idea. Mormons find polygamous marriages to be an excellent idea. Spartans found neglect and what we would call child abuse to be an excellent idea. Nietzsche puts it this way: Peoples are defined by the differences in their value systems. Ok, enough soap-boxing.
My site is now called Litmocracy (http://www.litmocracy.com), and it encourages people to make their own value judgments. It has matured quite a bit since I last posted here, and I'm still working on improvements.
Litmocracy has started advertising for work for free lance writers. My partner Don Eminizer is managing that side of the site and will be farming jobs out to talented members. We're also running an unpublished book contest which is waiting for 250 authors to submit their works and judge eachother's books. The prize is $1000. You can read more about the contest at http://www.litmocracy.com/forums/viewthread/375/