voting-examples

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)

• When is a link an endorsement? - Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman
• Anti-links - linking to things you disagree with and saying so - Kevin Marks
• Vote Links - Kevin Marks
• PageRank is Dead - Jeremy Zawodny

Real-World Examples

Centralized Implementations

• Digg - Digg is essentially a centralized voting system for links. Digg users can "digg" (vote-for) a link. 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. Comments on links can also be voted for or against - 'digg' or 'bury'.
  • Link and descriptions
  • # of votes ('for' votes)
  • controls to vote ('digg')
  • controls to vote on comments ('digg' or 'bury')

• 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.
  • Term and Definition
  • # of votes 'up' and 'down'
  • controls to vote ('up' or 'down')

• 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:

• Distributed votings using microformats from Artweb Design
• Boost Your Hyperlink Power - Jeremy Keith, using CSS to surface vote information
• VoteBack - VoteLink discovery + pingback/trackback

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

• XHTML SE
• vote-links
• Stanford paper describing an early version of PageRank