There’s little doubt that Web users find ratings helpful, even when they know that tastes differ and some ratings may be self-serving or entirely bogus. Would you rent a movie you never heard of from Netflix without glancing at its star rating? If it weighed in at 2 stars out of 5 after being rated by a thousand Netflix customers, would you still rent it? We recently covered RateItAll’s novel interactive widget that lets site owners install a simple widget that both displays rating information for that site and allows visitors to add their own rating and review. (Beta signup here.) Now, social news site heavyweight Digg.com appears to be planning on expanding into a broader range of ratings and recommendations.
Blogger Muhammad Saleem has some insightful comments on Digg’s apparent plan:
I can’t seem to get myself to agree with adding the other categories on the site. I feel, and I think most of the Digg community also feels, that Digg shouldn’t spread itself too thin, and this has been seen in the community’s uneven embrace of the existing categories on the site. While politics has gotten some traction (though a majority of political submissions are still buried) sports and some other categories remain empty.
We wonder too how well Digg’s current membership will adapt to a much wider range of activity, and whether they can achieve critical mass in such diverse areas as restaurants and products.
A bigger question is whether the Web is ready for a proliferation of rating systems and sites. Actually, on that score we think the answer is, “Yes,” at least to a point. I think it’s quite easy to imagine a site displaying multiple ratings, particularly if each rating system has its own constituency and special characteristics. While clearly every rating site can’t be a winner, the key ingredient for success will be to generate substantial quantities of reasonably credible ratings and reviews, and to make it easy for sites to display these (and generate MORE ratings). RateItAll seems to be on the right track with its interactive widget, and Digg itself is no stranger to widgetizing other sites. Ultimately, we can expect separate widgets that consolidate rankings from varied sources in a simple, compact format, and which still allow users to interact with each ratings site.
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