Waxy.org is the sandbox of Idea of the day: a Thumbs-Up button in the browser, which you click whenever you find a webpage that interests you. Click it up to three times depending on how much you like it, a la TiVo ratings. Clicking the button either posts to your own weblog, or maybe to a central website that aggregates ratings for browsing and allows you to syndicate your own ratings to your weblog, if you have one.
This would be an ideal way to manage my upcoming links sidebar and, if centralized, a great way to browse new links by people I trust. No personal weblog or technical skill required. Get to work, LazyWeb!
Update: Brad points to StumbleUpon, which handles ratings but no weblog integration or syndication. And Graham points to Erik Benson's Morale-O-Meter, which is a bookmarklet that posts website votes to a links sidebar. Very nice, thank you both.
12:03 PM
Interesting idea, but a little off.
The killer aspect of the Tivo thumbs-up/thumbs-down system is that it compares your preferences to the preferences of others. Based on the preferences of *others* that are like you, recommendations are made to you.
It's in place at Amazon, Netflix, and others.
To do this with weblogs would entail a centralized database of ratings to compare the ratings of all the users. If you want to browse links that are recommended by people that think like you, you need to exclude people that don't think like you.
For example, if you love+++ foo.com and hate+++ bar.com, you really don't want to see what a guy who loves+++ bar.com thinks. You want to see what other people who love++ and love+++ foo.com like.
Make sense?
12:07 PM
Absolutely. Note that I said I wanted to "browse new links by people I trust." To do that requires a central database.
Without a central database or recommendations, I still think that something like this would be a great interface for managing a quicklinks sidebar on a weblog.
12:18 PM
Erik's Morale-O-Meter is similar to what I think you're talking about, without the centralization aspect. He's got only two thumb-directions (+ and -), but I like the conceit of taking the sum over the last 10.
2:59 PM
we could only be so lucky for some random opensorce programmer to whip that up *wink wink*
6:44 PM
I think i like this idea. Even not owning a tivo.
And accepting links from people you trust, could be easily done in an rss feed if you just make a bookmarklet and have a weblog ready. That weblog can export the rss feed.
And when you want to show them on you main / real blog, just import the rss feed and have the xml-button ready
9:35 PM
I like the idea, just as long as it doesn't start bookmarking every single reality tv show website just because my wife visited the Real World site once. (My TiVo still doesn't understand my wife and I. Sigh.)
1:12 AM
Check out NewsMonster... we are going to ship RC1 or maybe 1.0 next week.
It uses a decentralized reputation system... it is pretty much what you want.
I am going to put out a test release to bootstrap the network tomorrow. If you want to help out send me an email...
Kevin
1:14 AM
No... this does not require a centralized database and nor should it. There are major scalability, security, and reliability issues with centralized system.
It is possible to use a centralized index to assist peers but I don't believe that it should be the only implementation.
3:08 AM
Memigo is close to what you're after, but it's limited to news sites. Worth checking out, though, as it's proved pretty succesful identifying stories I'll want to read, and I haven't had to spend a lot of time 'training' it...
6:34 PM
there is such a button, the smiley face button on the google button bar.
2:34 PM
I can't help but feel like this could only lead to unsolicited advertisements and 'suggestions' attacking us from even more angles than they already do. Companies seem to get all hott for this sort of user-specific content. To tell the truth, I'm not convinced that it's that much more effective than standard blanket coverage. Either way, I don't need cell text messages and banner ads on my cable listing to be altered or made more prevelent based on which web site i visited that afternoon. Evil.
8:53 PM
The new Google toolbar lets you copy and post content and links directly to your blog. Check it out: http://toolbar.google.com/index-beta.php
2:05 AM
Only if you use Blogger for your weblog! Besides, there are bookmarklets for doing that for practically every blog software. Not quite what I'm looking for, but thanks.
1:14 AM
I want to log the page source of Netscape Navigator.
Anyone can help me...?