OpenReview

Recently I saw an entry on Marc Canters log on OpenReviews. As I started publishing some simple reviews on my own log, I got interested in this subject again. What would I like to get out of this? I put some thoughts here on such a standard, which could be come an interesting fabric of a wide set of services. I did not read any of the OpenReview documents and comments yet, as I wanted to form an opinion first.

First I need some kind of definition of what I think an OpenReview is. For me it is a personal comment on something in the real (or virtual) world. And this ‘something’ can be anything: a book that I read, a DVD I saw, a museum I visited, a hotel I stayed in, a computer I bought, etc. It is something that I have formed an opinion on. This can even be a news event, a website, a comment on a blog item, an open review whatever. The central idea is that OpenReview is about something that can be well defined and is unique. This unique something is an extremely important of a Open Review.

An OpenReview is something personal. It is mine, I formulated the review. The review might have been solicited or not. It is a personal opinion, which is not coming from some advocacy group and is not supported by any group. As it is personal I hold some copyright over it. I determine how it is published and can be user. The Creative Commons might come handy here. I admit thought that the personal thing can become a bit shady.

The Open of OpenReview has to do with the publishing of the review. I might publish a review on my website, on my blog and make it part of a RSS-feed. Publishing makes my review available for the world. Anybody van see it and can do with it what he wants as long as he abides to my Creative Commons request.

There will be thousands of reviews about the same item spread around the web. And then syndication and aggregation comes into place. If I comment on a specific blog entry, I will be added to the comment-list through either the PingBack or TrackBack mechanism. In this case I created a review for a unique item, which can be identified by an unique URL. And the original author of the blog entry may syndicate my comments.

If I create a review for a book for instance it, there is no clear place where my comments should appear. On Amazon is a good guess, but there are more places where book reviews are aggregated. And each of these places is free to use my comment under the restrictions that I specified. One could envision a review aggregator service which gathers all these reviews (Google anyone?) and offers the combined reviews to review publishers as a web-service. This aggregation centers around the type of review, i.e book review, DVD review, Restaurant review etc. In order to find these reviews, a review must be easily found either through good tags around the review or specific RSS-feeds (review blogrolls).

Central to a review is the subject the review is about. This subject should be uniquely identifiable. For books the Amazon URL is usually used. But for other subjects it is not so clear what should be used. For products the UPC of EAN-code can be used as unique identifier. Creating this identification structure is the most central and most difficult thing of all.

But let’s start with books, but try to invent something that can be expanded to other subjects, items, whatever.