Marc's Voice
Home LANs + Broadband + Devices

Reviews:

A cornerstone of the trusted federated web is based upon other people's opinions on news, information, facts, events, content or commerce offerings.  eBay has a system in place - which helps bidders decide if the counter-offers being bid are 'real' or not.

But ascertaining the legitimacy of another person is not the only issue when it comes to sharing opinions.  What about aggregating opinions? 

Why can't we set up a system where ALL (or at least a critical mass) of opinions are collected, where EVERYONE can go to and contribute and find everyone's else opinions in a shared world - not relegated to separate 'islands'?

Whenever I find an interesting blog - I always see what they're listening to, watching, reading - basically what their opinions are on things that I care about.  We can all certainly agree that restaurants, movies, books, music, etc. are things that we may have opinions on and that Reviews on these things - is a nice logical way of defining and sharing our opinions.  I would love to be able to go to a stange city and find out where are the best restaurants - not based upon some paid restaurant critic, but a local blogger.

This has been attempted for services (Keen), books (AllConsuming), movies (Boothweb) and travel (numerous sites) - but never in a public, open manner.  Sure sites welcome contributions - but that input is relegated to the confines of that 'island'.  Cityblogs attempts to do this (ad hoc) ona  reiognal basis, but there's so much more we could do! Blogcritics comes close, but that's fairly nerdy long essays, not a simple form - that gets 'filled out'.

So why not create an open way to aggregate Reviews, share databases of Reviews and in general define a new 'micro-content' type - called Reviews?

The structure would be fairly simple and context driven - based upon what KIND of Review it was.  Writers could joint 'rings' of reviewers (based upon similar categories - such as web rings work today) or perhaps based upon locale and proximity (such as a Bay Area restaurant reviewers ring.)

Initial categories of Reviews could include:

- Movies, TV shows, rock videos and artwork in general

- music, albums, soundtracks, radio shows, etc.

- books, magazine articles, essays, dissertations - anything written

- restaurants, shows, events, clubs, resorts,, places of every shape and means

- airlines, hair dressers, car mechanics, all sort sof services and professionals- you get the idea

Obviously other categories Reviews could be easily added.

We'll find sponsors to put up these Reviews databases and base it upon a fairly simple, easily supportable micro-content type - and use RSS to syndicate it.

This is something we'd support and look forward to working with others to implement it.

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