On Wed, 25 Sep 1996 bryce@digicash.com wrote:
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It's silly to conflate ratings of people with ratings of people's opinions with ratings of people's ratings of etc.
Some of the people I work with have awful opinions on politics, other people, music, movies, books, and food, but great opinions on computer hardware, algorithms and programming languages.
But their ratings as people are generally very high.
(Insert inaccurate but amusing joke to the effect that if someone has good taste in restaurants they are likely to have poor taste in video cards, or some such.)
Check out Firefly (www.ffly.com). (Cpunk comment: they only track your ratings by nym, no True Name required.)
Firefly has the "if I agreed with Bob a lot in the past on this subject, I'll probably agree with him again" heuristic. It appears to be a pretty ugly heuristic when applied to me. Ffly keeps trying to suggest music which is in the same _genre_ as music I have previously recommended, but what I am interested is music that is similarly _good_. My tastes don't correspond well to genres.
This is incorrect. Firefly actually looks at what you have recommended and then finds others who have recommended or favor the same songs/albums/groups and selects new groups albums or songs based on the number of people who agree with your recommendations who suggest them. i.e. if you give the eagles a 5 out of 5, and 20 others also gave the eagles high ratings, the system weeds out what other groups those 20 gave high ratings to and suggests them to you. As you confirm or deny your interest in those groups, the system narrows it down even more, using those choices to find others who seem to have similar tastes to you and suggesting albums and groups not yet in your file which have been recommended by those with tastes like yours. This trancends genres. It's quite a nice system. It also makes an important point about reputations. Using a catagory reputation scale is, as the author above describes, not very efficient.
But this is a mere anecdotal impression. Give it a spin.
I wrote in the suggestion box that they add meta-ratings (especially ratings on the little "movie reviews" submitted by other FFly users). Some guy wrote back (same day!) that they were planning on it.
Regards,
Bryce
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