Blogarate is a blog rating site and widget combination. The obvious comparable site would be digg.com, but there are subtle differences. Blogarate targets blog posts specifically, as opposed to digg which covers anything that appears on the internet. There are other differences which I’ll cover shortly.

Blogarate is the creation of Clarke Scott, a Former Microsoft Solution Architect MVP. Staying true to his roots Clarke created Blogarate using ASP.Net, SQL Server, and MS Ajax. Take that anti-MS crowd!

Clarke, why did you undertake this project?

To provide a distributed news aggregation platform. By collecting blog post details including rankings at the source Blogarate reflects in greater detail what is making news on the web and what blog readers really see is important. Oh and it’s fun too!

Unlike Digg, there is no way to submit a blog post to the site. Instead it is up to the blogger to include the widget in their posts, which allows the reader to submit the rating. In fact it is impossible to vote for a post on the Blogarate site (as far as I can tell). I actually like this since it drives traffic to the blog, which is how it should work since the blogs are the ones providing the content for these aggregation sites.

Another thing I like is the ability for non-registered users to rate a post and still have it count. This does increase the ease of gaming however. Check out my post on adGridWork from a month or so ago on Blogarate. It was rated three times at 5 starts each time…all by me. One I did with my Blogarate account. The other two were when I wasn’t logged in, but all three were from the same computer/IP address. This is something that is going to have to be looked at before the system can really grow.

From the Blogarate FAQ:

Q: How does the rating system work?
A: Posts are given a rating of 1 to 5 by your readers. The algorithm for the rating system is kept a secret. We have kept this a secret so that the our system is as fair to all bloggers as possible.

My post that I rated 3 times at 5 stars each ended with a score of 15. The “secret” system seems pretty straight forward at this point. In addition to correcting the gaming issue, I would also suggest counting the anonymous votes for less then the registered voters. I think this is a good way to still allow anyone to vote, but controlling the impact of their vote. I would also suggest NOT keeping the system secret. Publish your algorithm and allow for open critique. Users are happier when they know how a system works and you’ll get less of the tinfoil hat types who think their is a conspiracy to promote certain blogs and keep others down.

My other complaint is with the widget. It was simple to install, but I wish I had more control over the look and where it appears on my blog. Some people will want to just put in the code and have it work, but plenty of others have super slick looking blogs and they’ll want to make sure the widget fits in with the theme. I was able to do some minor customization using css:

#PostRatingWidget {
     margin: 15px auto;
     background: #DDD;
     color: #fff;
     border: 1px solid #000;
}

But it just isn’t enough. What if I don’t want it sitting alone at the bottom of my post and I’d rather have it floated near the top of the content? Or put it in the header of the post? Maybe this is just a matter of putting together some advanced instructions, but I didn’t see that anywhere on the site.

I feel like I’m being super critical here, but a site that bills itself as “Blog rating widget” should do two things very well - rate and widget. There are big flaws in both of these right now. The flaws are correctable, but before I would even think about growing the user base or adding more features I would want to smooth them out.

I don’t want to give the impression the site is doomed. I like the concept - that the blogs themselves should be driving the ratings, rather than the aggregation sites. I meant my comments above to be constructive and I would definitely like to revisit Blogarate once it’s matured.

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