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.