Opinions
Every
person who uses the internet has a valuable commodity: their opinion.
Opinions in one form or another undoubtedly account for an easy
majority of all web content. People who voice their opinions inform
all the rest of us. When someone throws their opinion out into the great opinion heap of the web, they add to its collective wisdom (and folly).
Everyone
knows that opinions are like, well, you know what, and most of
them stink. That's why people who have informed, well-thought-out
opinions are like gold. When we find people who form their opinions
carefully and with reason, we tend to pay attention. At their best, the opinionators give a careful analysis of the facts that informs and
illuminates their audience. By listening to them, we can inform our
own opinion—whether we agree with the opinionators conclusion or
not. Once we find an opinionator who routinely agree with our
sensibilities, we often forgo reading their reasons and just adopt
their opinion. We have to.
There
is way too much information out there for us form our own independent
opinions on all of it, but when we are at a party, we don't want to
appear to be ignorant about a subject, or say something stupid about
it. It's the opinionators that save us. They do the work and we reap
the rewards of impressing other people with our savvy. For example, I
KNOW “Fifty Shades of Gray” is poorly written erotica that is not
even a good example of it's genre, because people I trust have told
me so. Have I read it? No. Do I have an opinion? YES! How cool is
that?
Well
informed opinions are valuable. Good ones take time to formulate and
state. Well known opinionators (a.k.a Pundits, Columnists, Bloggers,
and Reviewers) routinely get paid to give their opinions—and they
should. Valuable services deserve compensation.
Advertisements
Then
we come to advertisement. Advertiser's seek to influence and inform
opinion in a shamelessly biased, easily digested, and tasty way. We
know it, we expect it, and we defend against it. In newspapers, they
clearly flag opinions and thoughtfully label their advertising so we
know to take it with a grain or two of salt.
On
the web? Not so much. It's terribly easy to disguise ads as true
opinions. It's sneaky, underhanded, and just good business. It works,
it makes money and as long as that is true, it is unstoppable. What's
a poor opinion-eater to do? How do we protect
ourselves?
We
use science! We keep databases of our opinions on the opinionators.
We track the opinionators and log their opinions, and then serve them
up in tasty info-graphics or ridiculously simplified scoring systems.
We track the opinionator's street-cred, or web-cred as the case may
be.
Ideally,
the thought-police will track every publicly stated opinion and
action ever made by anyone and let us all know about it.
Unfortunately, that is a bit unwieldy, unreasonable, and creepy to
boot. Fortunately, even an extremely simplified version of this
information in a limited domain would still be useful. Of course, as an
author, I'm primarily interested in the opinions of readers and book
reviewers, so I'll explore that market.
Reviewing
the Reviewers
Amazon
has made a start at ranking reviewers. You can go to
Amazon reviewers and see their ranking of ten thousand reviewers. They
form their ranking system simply based on how
many people find their reviews helpful. As I said, its a start, but
it is not all that useful. First, it only tracks Amazon reviewers
(reasonably enough) and second, their ranking system is opaque and
limited.
It's
hard to believe, but there are highly ranked Amazon book reviewers out there
who dislike fantasy. Who knew? What
happens when one of them is temped/tricked/coerced into reading a
fantasy book? They will read it, and then write a careful and
considered review trashing the poor writing and ridiculous concepts
they find therein. The book gets panned, and the author slinks off in
disgrace, vowing revenge against the world. A new potential,
highly imaginative super-villain is born. Tragic. Not a result
anyone wants.
So,
what we need to see is a
standardized scoring system for each reviewer.
In addition to a helpfulness rank, we
want to know the total number of review's they have foisted upon the
world. We want to know the
average score they give. We
want that broken down by genre. Then, when we see
this person's review, we will know if it should carry any weight with
us. We could form a grid like the one below.
Reviews
of My Fantastic Fantasy
Genre:
Fantasy
Sub Genre: Alligators (optional
field)
What
does this tell us? Everything! Guess which 2 reviewers review for
money. Guess which of those give honest reviews for money. Guess
which one is the writer's mother or father. Guess which one is our
embittered embryonic super-villain striking back at the world. Guess
which one is an orthodontist. OK, so not EVERYTHING, but who cares if
a reader has straight teeth?
We
can take it even further if we want. We can give more weight to a person
whose opinions have been rated the most helpful,
collect standard deviations and come up with a single number which
allows us to rank reviewers like Amazon does, though we will expose
our formulas to all. We could use number theory to detect collusion like the on-line poker sites. How cool is that?
I
don't know about you, but this is what I want to see as a reader and a writer. So, get out there and do it, I'm busy writing.
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