Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

There has been lots of interest in our new ratings system after yesterday’s post. There were also a lot of questions. Let me try to address some of the most common questions I’ve been hearing:

Why do I have to have a NewsGator Online account to rate posts?

If we didn’t require registration, it would be too easy for someone to spam the ratings. As it is, it’s still possible if someone were to create a number of online accounts, but at least it’s a small barrier to having someone rate a post a “5″ hundreds of times to get it pushed to the top of the ratings pages.

Can I programmatically access the ratings data?

Yes!  Well, not yet…but we’re designing an API as we speak to be able to save and retrieve ratings. If you build an aggregator or a publishing tool, and you’re interested in integrating our ratings with your product, please contact me ASAP.

If we can all share one rating system, I think we all win in the end, since we’ll have more complete data to work with.

But then doesn’t NewsGator own all the data?

Well, we indeed store the data – yes. But it has to be stored somewhere. And our intent is to programmatically expose this data to those who are interested (within privacy and other constraints). The API isn’t written yet, but this is definitely the intent – it will be coming soon.

In a nutshell – if you build a product that uses our rating system, and you want aggregate data to do some cool stuff for your users, we’ll provide it to you as best as we can.

I added the script to my template, but it doesn’t work. Why?

Well, I don’t know…but if you post on the NewsGator forums about it, we’ll try to get you squared away.

One of the cool free features of the new NewsGator Online is the built-in rating system for content.  For every post you read within NewsGator Online, you can give it a rating from 1 to 5 stars, and see the community rating as well:

In the example above, the red stars are my own rating (I liked this post that I wrote, so I gave it a 5!), and the community average rating is shown by the orange (4 in this example).

Even better, you can now put these ratings on your own site…I’ve done this here (click through the link if you’re reading in an aggregator), and here are some other examples. If the user is signed into NewsGator Online, they will see the same interactive rating GUI; if they’re not signed in, they will still be able to click the rating image, and they’ll get a small popup to sign in and enter their rating. All in all, pretty seamless and easy to use.

Information about how to add these to your own site is on our Tools for Bloggers page.

So what do we do with all this data? First, we have the Highest Rated Feeds page, showing you the feeds which contain the most highly rated content. It also feeds into our recommendation engine, so you’ll get back good suggestions on other content you might be interested in.

This is just the beginning – we have lots of other cool ideas of how to use this data to give our users a great experience. Feeds of content that your friends rated highly. Feeds of the highest-rated individual posts of the day. The list goes on…and if you have ideas of your own, definitely let us know!

You’ve probably heard by now that we’ve re-launched NewsGator Online, our web-based aggregator, and we’ve made much of it free. Woo-hoo!

Here’s the part that’s now free:

• NewsGator Web Edition (the web-based aggregator), which includes recommendations, ratings, clippings, and lots of other cool features
• Blogroll publishing
• Headline re-publishing
• Synchronization with NewsGator Outlook Edition and FeedDemon (and other products in the future)

There’s so much cool stuff to talk about…for example, the new rating system we have for content. But rather than make you read for pages and pages right now, I’ll post more about this and other features in the coming days.

We’ve gotten some great feedback in the first few days – a few examples:

Brian LeRoux: This is the online aggregator I’ve been waiting for.

franck’s blog: The interface is very slick and years ahead of the Yahoo! implementation. If you read a lot of blogs, there is no contest.

anonymonk: In speed and looks it wins easily.

roudybob: I’m a big fan of NewsGator – and their online services are phenomenal.

Go try it for yourself, and let me know what you think! Just go to http://www.newsgator.com.