Personalization of rating scores

Earlier today we opened up our rating widget to the world. If you have a blog, go ahead and get it here.

One additional important feature we're releasing today is the addition of the personalization algorithm to our rating widget.

From now on, whenever we serve the ratings widget to a reader, we look at his/her rating history, find like-minded people automatically, and adjust the rating scores accordingly. This is what the widget looks like with personalization:

In other words – two people might be looking at the same blog post, but each will see vastly different scores based on each one’s personal rating history. The more each person rates, the better our recommendations will be specifically for him/her.

We think this is really important for two reasons:

1. When consuming content, personal tastes are waaaay more important than averages. Consider this example - The movie Pulp Fiction is probably loved and hated by an equal number of viewers. On average it would be rated say 3.5 stars (of 5). For potential Pulp Fiction lovers, this would be too average to rise above the noise. Many movies would probably fall in the 3ish range and therefore would not be recommended.
   On the other hand, potential Pulp Fiction haters might consider seeing the movie because 3.5 is after all a positive score.
   So with average ratings, no one really gets a meaningful recommendation experience. If your rating widget is limited to averages - it's definitely time to switch to outbrain.
2. The second reason we think personalization is so important is that it finally gives your readers a true personal incentive to rate stuff (and rate things honestly), as they get tangible, long term value from building a rating history.

Again - the outbrain rating widget is available, for free, here. No registration required.

Comments

[Ira]

The other "competitior" in post rating is the WP-postratings plug-in. it's not aggregating what people rate in more than one blog, just collects local stats, but it lets me see what the aggregated results are. here's the question...

a. where do I find the aggregated stats of post ratings on my blog?
b. where would a poster go to see the results of his past ratings (like, in which outbrain-enabled blogs I liked more posts? what other posts would I like?)
c. how do I customize the stars widget to appear in Hebrew or just choose a look that fits my blog better? At the moment I didn't find docs about how I can customize it.

[Ira]

OK, DEEP within the blog I discovered the firefox plugin, that answered part of "B", i.e. if I use google reader I can see the ratings of items by others.

still 2.6 questions unanswered :)

[Ira]

umm, is anyone from outbrain reading/answering these comments?

[Yaron Galai]

Ira hi - sorry for the delayed response... Here goes:

1) Full blogger reports are coming very soon (in testing right now). Shoot me your info to galai[at]outbrain[dot]com and I will set you up with access to your reports.

2) We do not yet offer raters full access to their rating history. That will come later (and it's true that our firefox extension gave some of that). We will start offering raters recommendations through the rating widget very soon. You can see this being tested occasionally on my personal blog - www.webx0.com (recommendations will only appear on posts you liked, and only when we're confident the recommendations are great).

3) Right now there is no option for customization. We put a lot of effort into making the widget "inherit" the look&feel of your blog, so that it looks beautiful and natural without requiring you to spend much time customizing it. We will probably open an option to customize the CSS down the road.
As for languages - we're almost there and hopefully soon our widget will translate itself according to the language of the post on which it appears.

Hope this helps. The best place to get help on stuff like this is on our support form:
www.getsatisfaction.com/outbrain/

Thanks for installing outbrain!!

[John Smith]

Is there a way to display the highest rated posts?
Some code that will automatically display the posts with the highest rating?
thanks.
I'm trying to do it here
http://widgetsforfree.blogspot.com

[Yaron Galai]

John - a widget for displaying the top rated posts is coming soon. We'll get in touch with you to make sure you get access to this in our friends&family beta testing of this functionality.

[Ivon]

Me he subscripto pero no me llegó el mail de confirmación, ni si quiera en el correo basura. que debo hacer ?

[Donovan]

I can't get the widget to space correctly under the post. It's flush below the last line of text, I'd like it spaced lower to the bottom... is that possible?!

[Yaron Galai]

Donovan hi - What blog platform are you using? (could you post your blog URL or send it to me to galai [at] outbrain [dot] com ?)
The easiest way to do this may be for you to insert a line break tag - - at the very begining of our code. Could that solve the problem?

[Alicia]

How can I install the code in Typepad's Advanced Templates?

Thank you!