December 10, 2006
Zach struck again. He has expanded our user voting from Articles to People. Now ValueWiki has a system for ranking users.
ValueWookies can now add “” along with “[ [Category:Top_10_ValueWookies]]” to their personal profiles to be voted by the ValueWiki community. Many stock message boards attempt user rankings, to separate quality posters from less credible users. Even Wikipedia has implemented a charming albeit non-scientific barnstar policy.
Our system allows users to vote for or against each other, just like a Digg button. The Value-Wookies with the highest rank are displayed at Top 10 ValueWookies. Eventually, we will probably display more than just the Top 10. That way, any ValueWookie can check their standing in the community.
Our goal is to inspire a positive community where users recognize and commend good writing, editing, and etiquette. Newbies can immediately recognize which ValueWookies have experience and credibility.
Stay tuned for new tweaks and additions to this feature.
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Posted by Jon
December 10, 2006
Last week I met an engineer for a Boston startup called Zink. They’ve developed a way to print without ink, allowing printers to become tiny enough to fit in a digital camera or even a cellphone. Zink is well-funded and tacitly backed by Polaroid Research Labs. I look forward to seeing this neat new technology in the future.
Like any tech startup, Zink is incredibly secretive. You’ll notice Zink’s website is password protected from other companies snooping around. This is common practice. When I worked at Oracle I was surprised to learn the degree to which all the tech companies keep tabs on each other. For instance, in the 1990′s following the cold war, many out-of-work-spies were hired to work in Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison uses Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which is basically a book about espionage.
It’s interesting to me that very little has been written about this. Certain companies are notorious in the tech-world and I keep expecting a tell-all book. There must be many ex-employees willing to talk to a journalist. This is a freebie, folks. If you are a journalist and want to make some money, go write this book!
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Posted by Jon
December 10, 2006
Much has been written about the accuracy of Alexa traffic rankings. While there is SEO consensus that Alexa rank is getting harder to game, there is still plenty of evidence that Alexa rankings are often innaccurate. As well as plenty of grumbling webmasters.
I am on Alexa’s side. Alexa is the internet’s most accurate free traffic ranking tool, and arguably about as accurate as Nielson ratings or Gallup polls (as judged by the size of Alexa’s statistical sample). Granted, the Alexa toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer, thereby negating the votes of surfers savvy enough to use Firefox 
. And granted, Alexa measures impressions which unfairly favors click-factories like MySpace over websites that only require one pageview. And granted, Google Analytics is probably a harbinger of an awesome Google-style Alexa site that I imagine is being developed as I type. But Alexa is currently the best traffic comparison tool we have, and is proven to be at least marginally accurate. Quantcast.com may be an interesting site when it gets out of Beta, but is currently less accurate than Alexa. So much like Democracy, Alexa is the least bad system we’ve got.
How This Relates to ValueWiki
The reason I bring this up is that ValueWiki is finally out of the Google Sandbox and now appears to be in some sort of Alexa Sandbox. ValueWiki traffic is experiencing a nice hockeystick chart now that Google has indexed more than 17,000 pages for the “valuewiki.com” domain and 5,600 pages for the “www.valuewiki.com” domain. A Google search for “ValueWiki” now returns over 100,000 pages. Meanwhile, it seems to be taking Alexa a while to register the new traffic jump. Alexa only checks our internet-reach once a week, and the results often leave Zach and I scratching our heads. The internet is full of disturbing anecdotes like Forscene.net which has claimed to have millions of daily impressions and no Alexa ranking.
Whether or not Alexa is reliably accurate, it is a benchmark for Silicon Valley VC’s and pundits and a badge of street cred in the Web 2.0 universe. So despite the supercilious stares of the SEO world, I will most likely continue my morning routine of checking my email, checking my stocks, and checking my Alexa ranking…
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Posted by Jon
December 10, 2006
Zach has built the framework for our user voting and I for one, am excited.
As usual, it seemed to take him less than an hour, which always mystifies me. You can try out a sample “Vote” button here.
So many Web 2.0 companies focus on voting, digging, and ranking. Meanwhile, the Wiki-universe is struggling to catch up on this. For instance, the MediaWiki Board of Trustees elections are labyrinthine. As is Wikipedia’s policy for selecting daily featured articles, a voting process that can take months or even years. Granted there are reasons for preventing anonymous users from gaming the vote, and a huge site like Wikipedia is faced with special challenges. But don’t these featured article criteria seem a bit Byzantine?
The only live Wiki Voting example I have seen is at the Democracy Wiki. It’s very slick and Digg-like, dynamically updating the number of user votes. Eventually, we may slick up our voting appearance as well, but for now it’s about 79th on the to do list.
How Our Voting Works
Voting allows ValueWookies to rank articles, stocks, and users. Any page a user votes on ends up in the Top 10 List Category. To start a new Top 10 List, just start a new page and add the [[Category:Top 10]] tag. This automatically places the page in the Top 10 List Category and adding the [[Category:Vote]] tag allows users to vote on it. That’s it.
As ValueWiki’s voting evolves we hope it will help guide every user’s experience. We will soon be testing a system for allowing users to vote “featured articles” to the mainpage.
Everything on ValueWiki is a work in progress. The system is still very Beta and your comments are appreciated. Stay tuned for more updates!
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Posted by Jon
