Five Star Knightrider
by Paul Miller
This is a brilliant hack and proof, perhaps, that online rating systems aren't all they're cracked up to be. Check out Amazon's review page for David Hasselhoff's 'best of' album which, with 633 reviews (at the time of writing), has to be one of the most popular things to comment on in Amazon history.
For those of you familiar with the hairy chested one's leather clad antics, I promise you laughter. But more seriously what does it tell us about aggregated opinion gathering on the net?
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Tony Quinlan
Tying into this, it's the great flaw I found in one of the highly-rated anti-spam programmes, Cloudmark. It blocks spam according to comments and remarks by its (massive) user base.
But how many people have forgotten about newsletters they subscribed to? How many just delete - or mark as spam - things they no longer want, without bothering to unsubscribe?
I found that newsletters that I subscribe to were being blocked by the software - not because they were spam, but because someone *said* they were spam.
To follow it through to its (hopefully extreme) conclusion, aggregated opinion gathering could end up defining things according to the sceptical/ignorant majority rather than an informed core group.
(I hasten to add that the ignorant majority is meant in a literal, not a pejorative sense.)