voting-examples

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Voting Examples

The Problem

There has been a good bit of discussion relating to how to represent the intent of a link from one site to another as an endorsement of that site or not. See Kevin Marks on voting (Vote Links) for initial arguments for a way to represent this information.

This page serves to document the current list of voting examples from real world sites for the design of a simple voting microformat. - Steve Ivy

Participants

  • Kevin Marks
  • Tantek Çelik
  • Steve Ivy

Discussion/Concepts

(This may belong on a page of its own)

Real-World Examples

Centralized Implementations

  • Digg - Digg is essentially a centralized voting system for links. Digg users can "digg" (vote-for) a link, or "bury" (vote-against) it. Links with more diggs float to the top of the popular lists, hence getting more exposure and getting more diggs/votes for and against. Markup is plain html - links and images. However, the semantics of a digg are still unclear - links often get many diggs though the majority of commenters disagree with the content of the linked page.
  • Urban Dictionary - dictionary of colloquialisms where users can vote up or down (for/against) terms in the dictionary. Markup is plain html - tables and images.
  • Google's PageRank - "In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B." Issues with PageRank's "any link is a good link" model are a major impetus to standardizing on a format for link-intention.
  • Slashdot - users can give comments a karma score which affects what comments are seen (comments can be filtered based on the score)
  • del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Technorati favorites - bookmarking sites that more or less represent a "for" vote

Vote Links

There are a few implementations based on the VoteLinks microformat combined with other technologies:

Example: Vote Links

(from: VoteLinks microformat)

<a rev="vote-for" href="http://ragingcow.blogspot.com"  
   title="neat spoof">Raging Cow</a>
<a rev="vote-against" href="http://ragingcow.com"  
   title="nasty corn syrup drink">Raging Cow</a>

Existing Practices

  • Most example sites, including Digg, UrbanDictionary.com, and Slashdot all use plain text labels or images for marking up their voting features.

See Also