I joined Blogexplosion from sheer curiosity as to what this would do for this stupid site of mine. Thud mentioned it once and I though, “Why not give it a try.”
I got an account, looked through some blogs, and that’s about it. I don’t know if my traffic went up or not. To some degree I guess it did.
One of the things you can do with BE is you can rate other people’s work. And you can see who rated you, and more importantly (for some I guess), what rating they gave you.
Which gives rise to vindictive voting. For example, I gave this blog by one Lewis Moten a low rating. A one, in fact. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. It wasn’t that bad. But the content and the design annoyed me.
The first thing I saw was this entry about the Star Wars trailer, which includes nothing but a screen shot and the comment,
I just watched the trailer to Star Wars Episode III — Revent [sic] of the Sith. Pretty cool, and I didn’t have to buy a Hyperspace account to see it.
Fairly lame, I thought.
Worse, the design is a little annoying, with all those frames and scroll bars. As I commented (admittedly later):
The embedded frames with the off-color scroll bars makes it visually unattractive. The floating link list on the right adds a distracting element, and partially obscures the site title.
So I gave it a low mark and moved on.
Well, it appears that Lewis, angered by my low rating, decided to give me a low rating.
Ah, the joys and pains of the cyber experience…
Sadly, I did the same thing recently. A few people rated one of my blogs very low (1) without providing any feedback. So, in a fit of immaturity, I gave them a low rating too (without really even looking at their sites). I’ve realized since then it was childish of me to exact revenge in that manner.
I wish people would leave comments and/or suggestions for improvement when giving low ratings.
i came here through BE, and i would say i liked ur blog a lot. nice.
I followed you home from my site, and I should say, it’s nice to leave comments, because we get to track down some good reads this way!
I’m here. I thought maybe I would try my hand at making a template. My skills are not that great (I’m just a programmer after all), so I’ve switched back to one of the defaults to help with lower resolutions.
About the content, you should have scrolled through a few posts. I don’t post screenshots often. I was at work Friday and was a bit excited that I was able to see the episode three trailer without having to pay for an account with starwars.com. I blogged it quickly using hello and left the link for others.
So, fit of immaturity – yea. I paused a moment, and then thought about how most people have rated my blog. Then I went through and voted. But hey, if they build in a feature to retract a vote, then I’d probably go back in and change it.
Ehhh… it says I have already voted on this site in the last 7 days. I’ll be back next week to recast my ballot for a recount.
I think the rating system is going to be pretty meaningless now for just the reason you cited. My ratings were pretty decent until I did one political post. Some guy gave me my first 1, and he doesn’t even HAVE a blog so exacting retribution is not an option. Not that I’d ever do that . . .yeah right.
I never give ratings, Never. If someone takes the time to create a blog and write posts, who am I to judge?
I have recieved a few low scores and I then go rate that person a high score, proving that at least one of us can act maturely.
I think the problem now is that BlogExplosion lets you see who gave you the ratings. Since nothing is annonymouse, everyone can cast revenge. It’s a little like Karma.
I think I’ll join Anita on this one. I’m just going to stay out of the rating game for now on. What does it matter if I get a good rating or not, it’s just on one site. I’m trying to come to terms with everything and realize that there isn’t a reason to get emotionally involved over this stuff. Sorry to offend you with my revenge.
There are always going to be childish people out there. I try, when giving a low rating (I’ve never given a 1) to let a person know why. I mainly rate on the design, how long it loads, and if I can read the font. I don’t think it’s really fair to rate on the content unless you’ve read the blog for awhile.
Regardless of how it started, the intended result—reading another’s blog—was successful,no?
wink Keep writing strong!
When the rating system applies the same rating for one vote of ‘1’ as it does for one hundred votes of ‘1’, I’d say it’s not the fault of the humans that the ratings are skewed. Numbers like that are only useful when there’s more than one or two ratings.
I was pretty annoyed when they started posting names on the rating site. Now I just rate them if they’re good and block them if they’re sites I don’t like. If they’re really good, I check if they have an RSS feed and add it to my feed reader. I have enjoyed your blog so far.
I am trying to join WordPress last week. It was only today that my account was activated. I still can’t feel the effect of the changes I made. If there is one guarantee, spammers are unwelcome here.