community

I was doing some work looking at how people set up content rating pages, and I looked at Yelp as an example.

While Yelp has had some issues recently, it still provides a good example of how community-driven ratings can work.

I've always liked to see ratings embedded alongside comments, and Yelp does this well. Their comment form is simple and effective; this is a good strategy to help mitigate drive-by raters; aka, people who put little to no thought into their feedback. While the comparison is not strictly accurate, I tend to think of these things in terms of sensitivity versus specificity: when collecting ratings, it's better to get fewer ratings of higher quality.

However, Yelp's page where they display content to end users is incredibly busy.

By my count, there are 11 different ways for people to rate a business, like a business, write a review about a business, and/or like and/or rate a rating or a reviewer.

When you are looking at content/information that has been rated by a community, what do you look for? What helps make community ratings valuable to you?

As many of you may have heard, Ning recently eliminated its free networks and laid off 40% of its staff. Currently, Ning supports exporting users; for those of you interested in migrating your community members from Ning into Drupal, you have two well developed options at your disposal:

• User Import: http://drupal.org/project/user_import
• Feeds: http://drupal.org/project/feeds

If Ning ever opened up their APIs to allow content export, then importing the content would be equally straightforward. Both the Feeds module and the Node Import module would get the job done.

Another option for data import is a combination of the Table Wizard and the Migrate module.

If you are launching a Ning site now, setting up a Drupal site to import that content via RSS using the Feeds module wouldn't be a bad idea. Should Ning go out of business, or change their terms again, or if your organization makes the decision to take control of your web presence, your data (and the intellectual capital of your community) won't be in the hands of a content silo.