Latest subject for peer review? You

Tired of twiddling with wiki biographes and writing unpaid reviews for Amazon? Perhaps you'd like to rate your co-worker, or boss, now that the wisdom of crowds has been applied to the great American public. In what must surely be the last gasp of Web 2.0 insanity we report the launch of PersonRatings, a site where visitors …

[Anonymous Coward]

3....2.....1.....Lawsuit

Title says it all.

[Mark]

Class

Class: Rogue / Fighter / Cleric etc.

Maybe you're rated out of ten for how well you fit between each class?

Don't see many paladins around these days. Maybe the advertisers want to weed them out to target them with paladin specific adverts. Underarm deodorant for the holyman who wears full plate maybe?

[Chris Simmons]

"Class*"

"* No, we don't know what that means in this context either."

Brilliant! New keyboard and monitor please.

Black helicopters? Because this is probably GOP sponsored to attack Barack.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooh. This not good...

It probably won't even fade away. It will melt down under the heat of the libel suits.

[Toastan Buttar]

This already exists.

It's called 'Hot or Not'.

[TeeCee]

Class

Obviously you pick from one of the following categories, depending on how tightfisted the rated person is:

First

Business

Premium Economy

Economy

Jump seat

Bog seat

Luggage

Ryanair

[Pete]

vanity driven popularity contests

There is no "wisdom of crowds", merely a superficial (and inaccurate) poll of whom they like best. Whether this is driven by physical appearance, "coolness", some weird ideas about what they think, or do - or just to rebel against unpopular judges (strictly .... what? exactly), there's no objective measures of talent, intelligence, skill or value to society. There is however, money to be made.

The trouble with all these things is that it makes participants feel as if their views have worth. That somehow, the casual, superficial and offhand decision they make about another person is as valid as a professional and expert assessment of whatever that person's attributes are. Not only does this make some of the participants think they are "as good as" the experts and that somehow they "have a right to decide", but it devalues the professionals training and experience to the point where theirs is treated as "just another opinion".

Maybe we should have a TV show where the audience votes on what medical treatments a group of patients gets - rather than the dull and anonymous concept of letting the trained and qualified doctors decide. Afterall, that's the process we use to elect governments.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds of lawyers firing up their expense accounts..

Amusing - this appears to be based on the opinion that with enough disclaimers you can prevent being taken to the cleaners for libel.

I give them a week, max. And then only because they'll spend the first half of that week fighting spam.

[Adam Foxton]

So....

... this means there'll be a Facebook app to do it in about 30 seconds time- rendering the entire website useless.

[Adam Cann]

How long...

... before some over sensitive individual based 5 to 8 hours east of us files a lawsuit demanding to see the details of all his rating contributions to find out who keeps marking him as a tosser

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they have slander laws in America?

In mean, really, how long before the lawsuits start flying?

Paris, because everyone's got an opinion about her.

[Jamie Kephalas]

Surely the...

...data protection act will come into play here somewhere.

PH, cause I'd love to see her ratings!

[Ray]

facebook minus...

photos. events. pokes. anaolgue synthesizer app. privacy. uh, oh yeah... any sense of an individual human being's worth whatsoever.

whoever came up with this idea should be locked up forever as they are clearly very, very dangerous. was it jacqui smith?

[Anonymous Coward]

@Adam Cann

Presumably you mean 'west', unless you're intending to load and fire this amazing, wonderful automatic-flamebait-generation site at people in Hong Kong.

[Steve Evans]

Wisdom of crowds?

If that's true, why do we continue to have Big brother and X-Star-get-me-out-of-here-celebrity-factor on the idiot box?

Surely stupidity of crowds is more accurate. Those likely to push the average IQ upwards keep quiet in case they use a long word, and slowly edge their way towards the exit doors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good grief...

...how incredibly bori...*snore*

[General A. Annoying]

@ "Do they have slander laws in America? "

It's published, ergo its Libel, not slander (slander = verbal defamation).

[Jesthar]

@Steve Evans

Terry Pratchett proposed in 'Maskerade that "the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters." My life experiences so far give me no cause to reject this hypothesis...

..so pass the popcorn, and stand by with the marshmallows!

(yes, hence the flames... ;) )

[Keith Doyle]

Huh?

Almost all the rated individuals on the site have photos-- yet very fiew of those actually have ratings, and instead have a single post by "Anonymous" asking if anyone knows anything about the person.

I would think people who write ratings would often not have a photo, unless they're shilling for the person or the person themselves, OR if they're the site admins trying to feed enough names in initially in order to get things started.

Looks to me that they "seeded" the site with names & photos scraped from somewhere else. Seems like they could get in trouble over that. In any event, it looks like more of a scam than anything else.

Also the search is broken-- got a server error...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...

What about the many people who share the same combination of names, thus making this heavily impractical?

And hasn't the BOFH already done this? Admittedly only on the company level, but who gives a crap.

[John Stirling]

random pick

Poor old Brenda Spoonmore of New York.

Let's see how many wrong things we can say. Allegedly.

[Anonymous Coward]

What A Joke Of An Idea.

Wake up the trolls, they've got a new purpose in life. Does anyone else suspect the web is making us incredibly stupid and shallow, and that in only a few more recent years?

Even if we discount the trolls, it's human nature to love in the 1st person but hate from afar (hiding behind keyboard). I can't count the number of times I've read of someone calling someone else an idiot on the 'net, but how many times have I read of one person calling another person very intelligent? It's impossible for this to work out any more than libel, gossip, and dirty laundry.

Paris, because we've been doing it all along.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

though it seems more likely the service will quietly disappear when the crowds decide they've got better things to do than rate their friends and colleagues for the benefit of targeted advertisers.

It hasn't done so far for facespace.

Entire populations are obsessed about how they are being perceived by others.

[ratfox]

Added one

Bernard Madoff was missing... Unfortunately, I couldn't put a negative score for "Trustworthy"

But really, I believe they will survive without getting sued their pants off. For instance, there's been a

"Rate my professor" for years, and some professors have complained, but the site still exists.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Keith Doyle

Good point. No one would bother with an empty site, so they have to put in some juicy fakes to get people going.

PH - Juicy and fake

[Cathrine]

Ahem...

What's stopping me from going in under various aliases (ali-i?) and just rating myself as the hottest, sexiest, most wonderful person in the world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing new

Somebody (or maybe bodies) created a tool that does exactly this. It's called "I Build My Reputation" (no points for guessing who my employer is - hint: check the acronym).

Personally I refuse to use it as it's lacks any accountability... these sorts of tools tend to attract extreme ratings rather than filter them out.

[IR]

For those not in the know

Nearly everyone in there so far is at least slightly well known, mostly politicians and journalists, even if only locally to the area. I'm sure they just culled all the info and pics from wikipedia.

I'm somewhat disturbed by how high a rating Christine Gregoire got for sexiness.