Rating bookmarks on Connotea

I've taken up knitting. The first few hours were pretty frustrating but I think that I've gotten the hang of it now. The nice thing about it is that it gives you time to think while you're working.

So, anyway, during my new found thinking time I was wondering:

Would it be useful to have ratings attached to your del.icio.us or Connotea bookmarks?

Rather than doing any kind of 'proper' research I figured that I'd tackle things in an agile, web 2.0 stylee and (a) go ahead and implement something and (b) ask questions of potential users later.

Whoever supplies the best set of answers / opinions in the comments gets a free hand knitted mouse cosy (possibly, eventually).

An implementation

connotea-ratings.user.js is a Greasemonkey script that adds AJAX ratings to bookmarks on Connotea. A "rate this link" prompt will appear under every Connotea bookmark along with five stars that light up when you mouse over them. Click to assign bookmarks ratings.



If you rate an item that isn't already in your library then it will be added for you automatically. Ratings are stored as tags ("gm_rating_1" for 1 star, "gm_rating_3" for 3 stars, etc.)

Unfortunately as everything is done client side you can't, say, sort all bookmarks by rating, though you can use the gm_rating tags in the tag cabinet on the left hand side to view only those bookmarks rated with one, two, three ... etc. stars.

To get ratings for items programmatically you could use the Connotea API.

Originally I was going to write a script that worked for del.icio.us too but it took a lot longer than I anticipated just to get Connotea working. Feel free to alter or extend the script if you are so inclined.

Some questions...

Any thoughts or opinions on ratings? Does anybody already rate their bookmarks on sites like CiteULike or Faculty of 1000? How and why? Is it for your own benefit or for others (or both)?

What kind of rating would be most useful?

Thumbs up, thumbs down? Five stars? A more complex system with different ratings for different intentions?

If I rate one of my bookmarks I could be saying that...

• I found it interesting / boring
• I thought that it was well / badly written
• I recommend / don't recommend it to other people

... or all of the above, or none of the above, or some subset of the above. Do people need to know what your intention is, or is that just making things too complex?

What kind of things would you use ratings for?

Within groups? To maintain reading lists? For social networking (A and B like many of the same links, so A might also like some of B's other links)? As a very basic version of LibraryThing...?