Category review

Application management and MicroContent

For a while I have been pondering the relation between user application management, the application Appfresh and the service iusethis.com. It is all about the applications one is using. For a while now there was a habit of publishing the things one is using. I did as well and created a blog dedicated to this. This blog lists the apps I am using, put on my dock and have been testing. (I really should work on this blog a bit more, though)

The iusethis service does something similar. Here is my profile. This service is somewhat similar to my own blog in that it lists the apps that I am using and have docked. The interesting thing about this service is that it also shows relations between applications, so that one can discover interesting new ones.

And then there is the desktop app AppFresh. This applications scans the hard-drive for existing applications, thus creating an application list. Subsequently this list is checked against a public list in order to check application updates. If there is an update, it can be downloaded and installed. This installation process is pretty transparent. If one takes a snapshot of an app, one can always rollback to that version. This is very useful, I already got bummed on an app. The problem is that the app is a bit to transparent and one does not always know the consequences of an update.

In addition AppFresh is integrated with iusethis. This means the apps found by AppFresh can be uploaded to iusethis, and if wanted flagged.

So where is the MicroContent in all of this. I see three parts: the application, the product information and the user input. The application can not be seen as MicroContent. The product information, i.e. the information on the application, can be seen as business MicroContent. Normally this information should be provided by the maker of the product, but in this case it is gathered by users.

And finally the user information. This information can be seen as a very simple review. Already the fact that an application appears on the list in the first place, can be seen as a review. At least the user took a look at the application. The user can only add a simple 3-level rating to this information: favorite, iusethis and is_installed (appears on the list).

I have not yet decided whether I find all of this useful for myself. Att the moment it is just fun to play with. And for applications that I really use, I will detect whether there are any updates available or not.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • service • type • review , appfresh, apple, macosx, apps, iusethis
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Google Map ratings

Categories/tags: MicroContent • mashing • type • review
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Bookshelf note sharing

Manton Reece describes how they are implementing the sharing of book information and notes between Book MicroContent Clients. They use Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for this. It is the first time I see SSE actually used. I am curious to see the application once it is finished. And I hope that other MicroContent Clients will add this as well.

[Inspiration Brent Simmons]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • type • review , SSE
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Winers reviews

Dave Winer is getting into reviews. He noticed that his reviews are locking into some silo's. And he has some trouble getting his data out of it.

He seems a bit late in noticing this, but better late than never. I hope it will inspire him to do some nice things.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • review
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Bookmarks, ratings and reviews: what’s the difference?

For my Wiki I am trying to define the various MicroContent Types I encountered in terms of the fields of a MicroContent Type.

Thus a Bookmark Type consists of an URI, a Title and a Description. This is however very close to a Review Type. A Review Type consists of a Title, a Review and an Identifier. It is possible to add other fields to either MicroContent Type, but that does not change the things fundamentally.

If one reviews a web-page, then the two Types become identical. Only the actual content might distinguish the two. And in case of a review, the Identifier might point to a web-page where one can find the product. One sees this a lot for reviews of books, where the Identifier points to a web-page at Amazon.

This leads to the conclusion that one should see a Bookmarks as some sort of Review. One could see a Bookmark as a minimal Review. The user has taken the time to create the Bookmark and has thus recorded his attention for the web-page. This recording is already a review: it was worthwhile to save the web-page.

And one can even go a step further by rating a bookmark as some services and applications do. The rating makes the appreciation even more visible. The same is true for rating a review. In that case one could even leave the description/review away, as is done in iTunes for instance.

I see the line Bookmarks -> Ratings and Reviews -> Rated Reviews appear. Each Type adds a new Field. The essential element of a Review is that it has an independent Identifier and not just a URI.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • bookmark • review
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Gibbity

A service where users can review/rate games. MicroContent structure consists of a rating, comments and tags. The service provides a short description of a game and links to gamespot and wikipedia. It also integrates some searches on Yahoo. Users can explore games through popular lists, recently reviewed, tags or free search.

[Inspiration eHub]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • review
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Browsr

I tried to get a grip on this service, but I am not sure I get it. The services has created a limited collection of service providers and websites. It does not seem possible to extend the contents of the directory and thus quickly becomes useless.

Users can comment and rate services in the directory. And they can rate the comments themselves. And this is where the MicroContent (reviews) comes into play. I guess the idea is that with enough ratings the more interesting ones will bubble up. That seems like a good idea. Their main page thus gives a listing of the most popular web-sites within several categories. I am not sure this is useful enough

[Inspiration eHub]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • review
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GamePedia

GamePedia by Bruji is an application to manage your console game collection. It has the standard three pane MicroContent client interface. It knows hand-picked and smart lists. And it has two predefined lists: borrowed and wish list. The columns in the Items-pane can be set by the user. Any new Item can be search for at Amazon and the found information can be used to populate the fields of the Item. Any field can also be changed by the user.

GamePedia is the fourth application, which allows to manage one's library. The others are BookPedia, DVDPedia and CDPedia. All the applications are very similar. The main change seems to be the fields of the Item. GamePedia recognises several fields which are specific to games: platform, difficulty, last played, multiplayer, etc. The user can further define his own fields and add a list of links to each Item. The latter is interesting for adding walkthrough and cheat pages. The links are viewed in an embedded browser. Naturally the user can also add his own review and rating.

GamePedia allows a user to export his data as internal format, csv, tab delimited or html. And it can upload to .Mac or iPod. Also interesting is the statistics given for a selected list.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • type • review
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Review blog upgrade

I succeeded in transferring my Review-blog to my new CMS-system, Expression Engine. This also implies that the blog has a new url. This url will probably change in the future. In my old system I could create some structure, but it was limited to six fields. Now I have an unlimited number of fields. For my review blog I am using 12 fields and impromptu fields will end up in the tag-field.
 
But with the new system, I can put the format where my mouth is. So I intend to implement this blog in various other formats in the coming days. So it gives Marc Canter something to play with. But the web-page is already there, although I need to brush up my CSS.

Categories/tags: type • review , microcontent; type; review;
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hreview creator

Ryan published a hreview creator. Just fill in the fields in the form and copy the code into your blog.
 
Great little app. I have to try it. And I would like to add such a thing to my own cms. Anyway have a look and use it!!!

Categories/tags: review , microcontent; hreview
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Deconstructing SB-Review XSD

I had a first look at the XDS-file for reviews as defined by Structured Blogging. And as I am to lazy to find a good XSD-resource, I has a go at it without any prior knowledge on XSD.

I am not sure what such a XSD-file defines. Is it just a single file or can I repurpose the definitions also in other files. I assume that it is the latter. Anyway the XSD-file defines a simple-review and its embedded elements. The simple-review consists of two parts: a sequence and version. I assume that version is the version-number of the StructuredBlogging (SB) definition. What the current version number is not defined in this XSD-file.

The most interesting thing is the content of the sequence. This is a set of 9 elements (I usually call this fields), which describe the review. These fields are: review-title, review-type, rating, product-name, product-author, product-editor, product-link, product-image-link, description. For each of these elements two attributes are defined minOccurs and maxOccurs. I guess this means how often an element can occur in a sequence. All elements have a minOccurs of 0, except review-title. I assume that this means that only the review-title is required and all other elements can be left out. I like this approach as it gives a lot of freedom. (I start to like the fuzziness of MicroContent). I would however have added minOccurs=“1” to the review-title to really pin it down.

The maxOccurs attribute defines how often element might occur. Several elements defined maxOccurs as unbounded, i.e. there is no limit to the number of occurrences. Thus you might add as many links to an image as you want. Only the review-type, rating, product-name and description may occur once. They should have added the maxOccurs=“1” attribute.

And as a next step all the separate elements are better defined. Most of these elements are pretty straightforward. Thus product-link and product-image-link are an URI, review-type, product-editor, review-title and product-author, product-name are a string.

Only the description and the rating are more complex. Thus the description consists of two attributes: type (string) and escaped (boolean, optional). I am not sure what escaped is supposed to mean. The rating consists of three attributes: number (integer), base (integer), value (float). With this could define a rating of 3 (number) out of 5 (base). I am not sure what value is supposed to do. Does it replace number in case you want to use a non-integer number?

Let me now look at the meaning of the elements. What am I supposed to enter there? I would use the description for entering the actual review in text as I would write it. The product-author would be an author of a book, the artist of the album, the director(?) of the movie, the producer(?) of my PC, etc. What the product-editor should contain is not clear to me. The product-link and the product-image-link is straightforward and could be used to point to any URI on the web (and not just Amazon’s). The product-name is also easy to fill: the name of the book, the name of the album, the name of the product in general. If all is well the product-* fields should be produced by the producer of the the product and serve only as identification. The rating is also an easy element. The review-title is something that the reviewer makes up. The review-type is not clear to me. I assume that it should be “book”, “DVD”, etc. But shouldn’t it be a product-type then?

Note that no creation- or edit-dates are defined, nor the author of the review. I guess that this information is in the XSD-envelope. This definition of a review leaves a lot of freedom. There are no element for ISBN-numbers, EAN-codes or whatever. In my review I use to note where I bought the product. And thus one can think of many more fields, which can be added to a review. I would like to see the product-elements in a separate schema, so that the product definition can be reused. And I would like to add a provider (shop) element, which is defined in a separate scheme as well.

And that is all that there is to the review. It leaves me with only a few questions:

• What should the product-editor element contain?
• What does review-type contain?
• Shouldn’t minOccurs and maxOccurs be present for all elements to make things more clear?
• What does the value attribute of the rating element mean?
• What does the escaped attribute of the description element mean?

Categories/tags: review
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RVW!

Marc Canter asked me to have a look at RVW! What RVW! does is query Amazon based on input of the user. This results in a list of possible correspondences. The user then clicks on the item (book, CD, DVD) that he wants to review. This fills in the fields that correspond to the del.icio.us bookmark service. The user then only has to set the rating, add tags and a description (a review).

I must say that this is a very neat way of posting reviews. But everything must be encoded in the four fields that del.icio.us offers: url, description, extended and tags. For a book review the url is then the link to the book at Amazon (you can chose your locale), the description is the title of the book, extended is the actual review and in the tags field multiple things are added: books, year of publication, the ID (urn:asin:0596005431) and a rating (rating:). Thus instead of defining new tags, a set of standard values are defined. It is an interesting approach. I would however make it more clear that the RVW-namespace has been used. Thus: format:book, year:2004, urn:asin:0596005431 rating:future. And we have to formalise the tag-field.

(Marc Canter wants me to learn this book)

In OPML this would look something like this:

    <outline text="book review" RVW="RVW">
      <outline text="http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005431/" RVW="url"/>
      <outline text="Hugh E. Williams, David Lane: Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL (en anglais)" RVW="title"/>
      <outline text="A book which I stiil must read" RVW="description"/>
      <outline text="php mysql" RVW="tags">
        <outline text="book" RVW="format"/>
        <outline text="2004" RVW="year"/>
        <outline text="0596005431" RVW="urn:asin"/>
        <outline text="future" RVW="rating"/>
      </outline>
    </outline>

The entire review is a parent with attribute RVW=“RVW”. Each field is a separate child with an appropriate RVW= attribute (url, title, description, tags). The special encoded tags are a child of tags with appropriate RVW= attributes (format, year, urn:asin rating).

I must say that this looks pretty neat and very easy to produce in an outliner. I only miss the image (RVW=“image”) and I guess I could add an ISBN-number as well (RVW=“isbn).

Categories/tags: review
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Structured Blogging & OPML

I had a look at the formats Structured Blogging defined and made an attempt to translate it to OPML. Here are the results of their review example page.

A piece of OPML:

<outline text="Doin' Something" category="Review-CD" >
   <outline text="
      <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000059QYA?v=glance">
      <img alt="Product Image: Doin' Something" border="0" 
         src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000059QYA.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg"/></a>" 
      category="Review-image" />
   <outline 
      text="<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000059QYA?v=glance">Doin&#8217; Something</a>" 
      category="Review-product" />
   <outline text="My rating: 4 out of 5" category="Rating" >
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Fullstar" />
      <outline text="" category="Emptystar" />
      <outline text="" category="Endstars" />
   <outline>
   <outline 
      text="<p>Soulive is one of the great jam bands. They're almost impossible to 
capture well on CD, but this disc comes the closest.  I don&#8217;t really know 
what to call it: acid jazz, or just jazz, or trip-jazz, or something.  It&#8217;s basically 
just a really good flow.  </p>
<p>And there&#8217;s no singing (except for some guest vocals on a couple of
tracks).  Not necessarily good or bad, just different.  I probably would have given this disc 5 / 5, 
but part of the reason for the post is showing off the &#8220;stars&#8221;, and I wanted to demonstrate an empty one too.</p>" category="Description" />
<outline>

I took the HTML-page and added all HTML relevant to the page or Wordpress out of it. That left me with the pure MicroContent items. I kept only the tags with a class attribute starting with x-wpsb. The content of each div has been translated to an outline-tag.

Some observations

• I like that they differentiate between an entry and a sbentry. The sbentry is everyting pertaining to a MicroContent item;
• Why a different outer tag for each type of product? Why not just a single review tag for the outer tag. And an additional child-tag to define the producttype (Book, DVD, CD, Coffeemachine, etc.). The only reason I can think of is if you want to layout different for different product type. Good reason, but it is not so clean now;
• Where is the title? I miss the title of the book, CD, DVD, etc as part of a SBentry. In put the title now with the parent of a review, but there should be a separate tag;
• I had a bit of a problem with the title in cyrillic. I am not sure I did that right;
• What is the approach when in a single review multiple items are reviewed? Can I ass multiple images and multiple links?
• The rating is a bit funny. There is a text-version, i.e. My rating is for out of 5. And there are 6 div’s contained in the rating, either fullstars or emptystars and a closing endstar. I am not sure that this is the most elegant way to solving this. But I have no alternative at the moment.
• Nice thing is that every layout issue is deferred to the CSS stylesheet;

Next step is having a look at the XSD and the other Microcontent type: events.

Categories/tags: review
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Book identifiers

Joh Udell has an interesting weblog entry on book identifiers, such as ISBN. This is relevant for Microcontent such as OpenReviews. The identifier in an OpenReview gives a unique reference to what is talked about in a review. For book reviews the ISBN-number is a great identifier. It is available in the book and many bookshops offer a search capability based on the ISBN number.

However normally one would like to add a reference to a web resource as well. But which one? Usually one adds a link to Amazon as it has a lot of information around books, and it is possible to create an URL directly to the book page. Jon Udell shows that you can point to the pertinent record in the WorldCat (a combined catalog of libraries) as well. Thus you might point to the library where you borrowed the book. I would prefer to link to a site of the book of the original author, but that is not often available. Thus you are left with many linking possibilities. One would like to be able to distinguish these different links in a review to give the user a bit of guidance. And what about ISBN numbers of translations?

Categories/tags: review
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OpenComment

The main idea of an OpenReview is review, describe your feelings on a book, CD or product. But you can also review websites, weblogs or weblog-entries. This sounds very similar to leaving a comments on a weblog-entry. I hardly leave a comment somewhere and if I do, I like to have a copy on my weblog. I like to keep ownership of all content that I put on the web. Thus comments on a weblog-entry will appear on my weblog as a separate entry. Basically this is a review of a weblog entry. The weblog entry that is reviewed is referenced through its permalink. Thus the identifier of the reviewed item is not the ISBN-number, but a permanent link.

By combining all this links through trackback the original writer of the weblog-entry can create a thread. This thread can be very complex as it can combine also comments on comments. The thread becomes hierarchical and not just linear. Note that a time-stamp of publication or creation-date is then essential to create a good thread.

Categories/tags: review
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