Bring on the Ratings (we already have them here)

In a recent post, Garett Rogers reported:

Some blogger users may have noticed their blog suddenly started showing star ratings — a feature that appears to be in the works, and according to Blogger, was given by accident to some unsuspecting bloggers. The feature hasn’t been released yet, and they have “fixed” the problem.

The Blogspot Known Issues Blog noted this is an experimental feature that was accidentally enabled on some users' blogs. Jmnlman suggests removing them when they do get here.

I disagree, with a caveat.

As we observed, in Anonymous blog ratings should not be used like a digital sniper rifle, ratings are important when we try to wade through the massive amounts of information as we engage the semantic web. These ratings will allow us to see what others thought about a certain author or product, and will likely allow us to filter the ratings by group, allowing us to see what all people, people in our profession, people in our country, and people in our social group thought.

But in the hands of some, anonymous ratings can be misused.

There are some who will act like snipers, usually for personal reasons, crouching on the rooftops of the Internet to pick off bloggers who spend (way too much) time posting their thoughts and ideas.

Here's a suggestion for Google on the Blogger site: Make commenting mandatory for ratings! If you don't like the post, say so! If it contains things you don't agree with, say so! If you haven't the intestinal fortitude to openly post your opinion . . .

What do you think?


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