What's up foodies and technophiles...long time, no talk. Well, I'm just 2 short weeks removed from the re-launch of FoodFinder.net, and I'm really happy with the product. The new look and feel is great and there are some new features that work together to give a unique take on the ever-crowding restaurant guide space. Over the next few days or so, I'll do a quick walk-though of the new feature set and some lessons learned. For now...let's start with the basics.
The Foodie Reputation Engine
This feature came in a bit late, but lays the foundation for (what I think) is a pretty innovative idea; more on that in a sec. Plus, I got to satiate my algorithm-loving inner geek. Taking a page from Stack Overflow, I created a reputation engine. The goal was to mathematically qualify a the knowledge of a foodie based on level of participation, dining experience, and community recognition. I won't go into the boring (and super secret) details, but from a high level, it borrows concepts from SO, and Google's PageRank concept.
"Why should I care?" you ask. Now, when you read somebody's comment card, check out their ratings, or view one of their lists. More specifically, this approach attempts to solve the problem of user-reviews being less valuable due to lack of experience or potential bias...a point that is well articulated in the first question of this article.
Well, that's it for today. Next up, I'll tackle "Ratings by Reputation".
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