This is entirely in response to ghostlightning, who has fully indulged me with an adjusted concept of “relative ratings” and the realization on melative. Don’t care for melative? This post does extend the brand of listing, melative is just an example.
Saaa~.. melative’s relative ratings (which can be translated as a list) can fit this branding perhaps even more thoroughly than simple favorites or 10/10 ratings on MAL, because an individual’s “brand” does not end with anime or manga…
What the hell is relative rating?
It’s an ordered list of items from least to greatest, with respect to some aspect of each item. The default melative list is in regard to overall quality or objective solidarity. Another way to look at it is a dynamic point-rating system, in which the depth of rating is user-adjustable. Further, items can share levels.
Given my own mixtures:
http://melative.com/RyanA/r/anime
http://melative.com/RyanA/r/music
(these are not absolute or complete, but simply adjustable)
Mathematically, one can see what will come from combining these things, as ghostlightning put it, a brand. Though, I believe a brand needs something more.
Understanding the Brand
What occurs with these lists is not of importance between individuals who know precisely what most of the items are, but when we have an individual quite unfamiliar with the items of a list, what shall they understand of this brand? Particularly, what sort of brand-understanding occurs between someone who has no clue about anime, but a decent clue about film? What occurs when that anime-branding is accompanied by a film-branding?
In this circumstance, I believe that a given brand transcendence will be applicable between individuals thriving in difference media. This is the bone of the sword. This is the soul of melative; each media can be related and we can begin to mesh with lovers of various mediums, thus exposing, sharing, and expanding each and every perspective.
Comprehensive Brand
Lists are fabulously compact, but this branding is quite flat and impersonal. So we are given a list of someone’s top whatever, great, but there is more to a list in how it became that way; the journey in which a list was created, the true brand.
I am infering here that we need something more than a list, we need a history. Natsuneko makes a solid point here, although we were tangential on the topic of tags and tagging. Reading the individuals experience along the way, whether it be full-blown blog posts, MAL posts, Reflections, disorganized twitterings, or the melative stream is what will give us a richer nature of one’s brand. It is a profile composed of expression rather than composition…
Personally, I was attracted to the blogosphere for this vary reason, reading what others had to say in non-formal, luscious flow-type expression and being able to go back to it in an organized fashion (tags, aggregators, categories, etc).
end melative
ghostlightning’s post inspires me to standardize a second type of relative rating, or rather distinguish two optional views to further stimulate this notion of list brand: the subjective relations and the objective relations. Currently, it is just one list (with a statistical backend for calculating the goods), and though arbitrary instances of lists have been pondered, they’ve been avoided because there would be no measurable value across many lists catering to an arbitrary set of aspects. It is good to continue pondering…
Coincidentally, melative caters to the more comprehensive branding via expression in the stream. One may notice that the application does not care about how many episodes of series Q a user has seen, it is arbitrary and useless. What the system can and does show is the state of an experience and expressions made along the way via reflections or contextual micro-posts (via announce). If a user has updated or reflected on a given episode, what use is it in assessing they have 6 more episodes left to watch, or have watched 17 already. Anyone viewing this user’s stream updates or reflections on the title will understand far more about the individual than by simply knowing they have seen 17 of 24 episodes and gave it a 7.
I think I like it, and will comment further after I try it.
Do say more. I’ve had immense trouble with putting Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam in my MAL 5, because even though I’ve seen the movie compilations I’ve only seen 26 of 50 episodes of the TV series. Also, I don’t rate shows in MAL until I’ve completed them but I’ve seen others do so.
What are your thoughts on this matter?
Do try
but please excuse the accessibility, I’ve drastic improvement to get on. (melative is a theory and API not yet fully assembled in interface :/) Suggestions, commentary, input, bashing, etc is welcoMed.
Well how this situation would work, in the optimal-case would be something like:
While watching those 26 episodes, you managed to make small comments/expressions in near real-time. After episodes you may have made a reflection or blogged about the episode. These things serve the retrospect. Now we need the list.
You add the title to your subjectivity/favorites list, which is composed of not just 5, but however many titles one wishes. Now what happens is that one doesn’t intently make the top 5, the items simply are compared to one another and justly ordered. The lists are meant to be pliable, so shifting items around from various levels is fine.
So 26/50, the state of the experience, whether finished or not, plays into it, but the thing to remember is that a complete experience and a current/paused experience are both states. One viewing the list should be able to see this state, but the progress should be viewed in the expressions.
On melative, one can view a user’s stream updates/reflections for a media or single-title without much hassle of searching or naming conventions. (announce/action/stream update/reflection are all capable of being directed onto a media-title). Like my reflections or stream announcements on Toradora! So given this questionable, not fully completed title on a user’s top 5 might need some form of justification to make sense, and that is the purpose of these updates.
In this way, users can view a top 5 list as well as the interaction/expression the owner had while experiencing given titles, or in general retrospect.
The site just enables this logging of expression directly on titles for later reference or meaning to the owner or other users. Top 5 is a good example in where this log allows understanding to the journey behind a given list.
An even greater advantage occurs when mixing friends, since melative currently allows viewing updates on a given media/title/character/creator within just the pool of friends (or those one follows). (this is also allowed in the stream for #tags and !groups)
Note: it is more about style of interaction. melative doesn’t try to replace sites like MAL. We are trying to explore various ways of interacting and relating media-title items, making orderly sense of them, as well as provide an open interface for reference and other applications to build on.
This style of interaction can probably be accomplished with a combination of MAL/AniDB, twitter, and blogs, but there is no tie together, and twitter is plain disorganized for episodic logging from the perspective of anyone other than the one doing the updates. Blog posts play into melative in various ways. If one wishes they can post an article link right onto a title or make an association (bookmark) in which the event pours into the stream notifying friends.
melative is just a different meta-social approach to media interaction and ratings.