{"id":1915,"date":"2011-05-21T06:47:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-21T10:47:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=1915"},"modified":"2011-05-21T09:53:07","modified_gmt":"2011-05-21T13:53:07","slug":"facebook-and-wot-wot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/facebook-and-wot-wot\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook and WOT – WOT??"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carole asks about Facebook and WOT
\n<\/strong>Facebook is now going to use WOT … What will happen, they \t\t\t\tare already having trouble, what will happen? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Our Answer
\n<\/strong>Your guess is a good as ours. WOT is getting a lot of \t\t\t\trecognition and working their way into a lot of different areas. \t\t\t\tThis is troubling. Not many people really know how WOT works, \t\t\t\tlet alone how it arrives at its site ratings. It is basically a \t\t\t\tcommunity-based rating system which is bad enough. But when you \t\t\t\trealize that out of supposedly millions of members, a handful of \t\t\t\tthem (less than 100) are making the majority of the site ratings \t\t\t\tit gets worse. Not to toot our own horn too loudly be we’ve been \t\t\t\tway ahead of others in a lot of things – and this site-rating \t\t\t\tmania is no exception. Everyone is rushing to add “safe-surfing” \t\t\t\tcommunity-based (so they can’t get sued) site ratings to their \t\t\t\tprograms: Norton, Avast, McAfee, AVG, and others. More will \t\t\t\tfollow for sure.<\/p>\n

Site ratings based on average users’ input sounds like a \t\t\t\treally great, democratic idea. But WOT’s community has been \t\t\t\tovertaken be a small number of attention-hungry (apparently \t\t\t\treally bored) people who make tens of thousands of posts every \t\t\t\tmonth. They have no idea what they are rating but the vast \t\t\t\tmajority of ratings are negative. The only thing that matters to \t\t\t\tthem isn’t the accuracy but the number of ratings. WOT turns \t\t\t\taround and rewards these kinds of people with participation \t\t\t\tawards. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.<\/p>\n

So what’s going to happen when WOT is integrated into \t\t\t\tFacebook? Our prediction: pain. People will be getting little \t\t\t\tred WOT warnings on their\u00a0 “walls” when anyone posts a link \t\t\t\tthat WOT doesn’t like. You can depend on the warning to be based \t\t\t\ton facts or real information, but you can imagine many will avoid \t\t\t\tthese warnings and notify the profile owner of their dangerous \t\t\t\tcontent. It will be a mess. I can’t see WOT lasting very long on \t\t\t\tFacebook unless they use some different, more objective \t\t\t\tsite-rating system. We can picture it already – they’re going to \t\t\t\thave a cadre of Facebook users running the show – and when this \t\t\t\tFacebook community gets going – a handful of attention-starve \t\t\t\tFacebook\/WOT users will start running amok. And if WOT’s past \t\t\t\tbehavior pattern continues – those who run amok will be welcomed \t\t\t\tand even rewarded with ridiculous “platinum” awards from WOT.<\/p>\n

Isn’t it time we all get serious and stop welcoming \t\t\t\tcensorship into our world? Censorship never works. You’d think \t\t\t\twe’d have learned that by now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carole asks about Facebook and WOT Facebook is now going to use WOT … What will happen, they are already having trouble, what will happen? Our Answer Your guess is a good as ours. WOT is getting a lot of recognition and working their way into a lot of different areas. This is troubling. Not many people really\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[730,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1915"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1936,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915\/revisions\/1936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}