New Weblog Look

[Former Member]

Hi,

The new Weblog-look looks fantastic(a tongue twister there), but I do not seem to get some of the functionalities like:

a) When I rate an author, is it the author I am rating or the article I am rating ?

b) I believe there is no need to rate an author(we don't want favoritism here), <b>the need should be to rate a weblog</b>. Just a suggestion.

c) Any suitable reference, where I can understand the new Weblog look and its features. (I did see it is in beta stage, but I was just too excited and wrote this).

Once again, it is amazing, how you guys catch up with the suggestions so fast and make it look better and better everytime.

Regards,

Subramanian V.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Subramanian,

When you rate an author you indicate your level of interest in him or her. The system bases its recommendations on you ratings and will suggest new blogs to you based on your past ratings.

It is important to note that rating an author is a forward-looking action, i.e. it affects how future weblogs from that author will be ranked and therefore recommended to you. This is a unique patent-pending feature of myWeblogs and is not typical to any other weblog site, which is why it may be confusing at first.

Contrarily, ranking an individual weblog is a backward-looking action as it only affects that weblog, which was already published. This has always been the traditional way for communities to recommend weblogs and we intend to support it in an upcoming version. Then we'll be able to share a weblog's average rating with all users.

BTW, you may rate more than just authors. Almost any term can be rated: "Java", "Enterprise Portal", etc. In many cases it's better to rate a term than authors as it indicates an interest in a topic that may be written on by several people. For example, I rated "TechEd" very highly in order to see all the new weblogs about the conference.

You may find some help on the new look by hitting the "Help" link at the top-right corner of myWeblogs. You can also find help snippets throughout the website describing each section as you look at it.

Brian

PS, thank you for your feedback regarding SDN's myBlogs section. It is very important to us to get feedback from members like yourself as we continue to incorporate improvements into the site.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Brian,

I like the forward thinking action you are working on but no matter what you do most everyone is still going to want to rate individual content.

For example I may post a weblog that was fantastic (hopefully one day) and someone may think wow that is great and rate me the author as "I Really Liked It" however the next weblog from me may be of no interested, off topic or just bla bla well if they change their rating because of that one weblog then they may have to change it again based on the next weblog.

I would recommend putting both items in place - personally I like the idea of the author because I'll see those items faster but if I come across a bad weblog I would rather rate that in terms of that and not just an author. Why punish an author for a bad day?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Brian and Craig,

Brian, it is true, what Craig says. However forward looking it may seem, at end of the day, I would still rate a weblog than an author.

In fact, what I feel is, if an author has written say 10 weblogs and with ratings 1-5, 5 being the best, lets say he has scored an average of 3.7 That is good, in my opinion. So this is the way an author should be rated, based on the ratings for each of his weblogs, and not the other way around.

Question comes is, what kind of statistics do you arrive at since there would be many people rating the same weblog. Well, I am confident you can figure out this one.(You guys figured out SAP).

I am sure, there are some thoughts behind forward looking, but at the moment(may be its the night time, in fact it is 12:00 am), it doesn't seem to strike me. (I shall re-read your post again, tomorrow. ).

I saw a rating system similar in Launch, the Yahoo Music site, and the rating system is somewhat similar.

I know there will be technical differences, but it hardly matters from the user perspective.

Unfortunately, I have not seen many people respond proactively to new weblog look. Did Shai say there are 10,000 SDN users or was it 100,000 ?

Regards,

Subramanian V.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

100,000+

[Former Member]

Check out the weblogs from Brian Willis - he talks all about the new look.

I agree - it should be rate the weblog and not the author.

[Former Member]

Hi,

Thanks for pointing it out,Craig. I just found out that I was gazillion days late to point out that, content should be rated and not author(I thought I was a regular here, somehow missed that Weblog).

In case people are still searching for the link(/people/brian.willis/blog/2004/09/23/can-you-make-your-blogs-do-this) , this is where Brian Willis talks about the new Weblog look.

Was browsing through the <b>'Browse by topic'</b> and it seems all topics have a photograph of <i>Benny Schaich-Lebek</i> and the weblog <b>'Its all over now'</b> seems to be omnipresent.

Looks like a doom day judgement to me. Kind of scary.

Regards,

Subramanian V.

Message was edited by: Subramanian Venkateswaran

[Former Member]

Brian has written a couple of the subject and at TechEd he talked about it as well.

I just can't wait for it to get out of Beta although I do hope they can the rating method as well.

/people/brian.willis/blog/2004/08/24/spice-up-your-blog-life

/people/brian.willis/blog/2004/09/02/introduction-to-sap-viewpoint-session-at-teched-san-diego

/people/brian.willis/blog/2004/09/23/can-you-make-your-blogs-do-this

Are the 3 I think that are specific to the new Weblog views.