On July 28, 2008, I installed the WP-PostRatings plugin on my blog, and since then, watching what and when people rate has been an interesting experience. If you haven’t yet enabled ratings on your website, it might be a worthwhile effort to do so, because you’ll get another sort of feedback about your content beside the usual reader comments. I think many people who are too shy to comment, or those who haven’t got the time to do so, would still like to give me an idea of what they think about my articles by a quick click on some stars, and that’s very helpful to me.

By now, I’ve gotten 1,339 post ratings. Considering I’ve had the plugin installed for 533 days, that works out to 2.51 ratings per day. Since 7/28/08, I’ve had 374,756 unique visitors, 415,857 visits and 595,078 page views on my website. That means 0.23% of my page views yielded a rating.

Let’s compare that to my comments for a bit. Since that same date, I’ve had 1,754 comments posted to my site, or 3.29 comments per day. That means 0.29% of my page views yielded a comment. It’s slightly better, but not by much, though I should specify that, by and large, the folks who commented didn’t leave ratings, so that means I got feedback from two different sets of readers.

Still, if I combine the two types of feedback together, it means I got 0.52% of my readers to give me some sort of feedback. I’m interested to find out how these percentages stack against established benchmarks, so if any of you can point me to the benchmarks, please do so.

Even if my feedback stats may or may not be something to brag about, I can be happy about the quality of my ratings. My rating score is 6,370, which means my average article rating is 4.76 out of 5. I like that.

I thought I’d tally up some of my highly rated and most rated articles below, for historical reference.

These are my top ten highest rated posts:

1. Hardware review: Drobo (5.00 out of 5)
2. The underrated Betta fish (5.00 out of 5)
3. Matrei im Osttirol (5.00 out of 5)
4. Hardware review: WD My Book Studio Edition II (5.00 out of 5)
5. Hardware review: Elgato Turbo.264 (5.00 out of 5)
6. Automatic redirect from HTTP to HTTPS (5.00 out of 5)
7. A Dell order and return experience (5.00 out of 5)
8. American habits (5.00 out of 5)
9. Hardware review: Logitech Alto Connect Notebook Stand (5.00 out of 5)
10. A few words on the economic crisis at hand (5.00 out of 5)

These are my top ten most rated posts:

1. Hardware review: Dell S2409W Flat Panel Display – 61 votes
2. Stranded in Frankfurt thanks to United Airlines – 21 votes
3. How I got cheated on eBay – 14 votes
4. USPS Priority Mail is anything but that – 13 votes
5. Hardware review: Second-Generation Drobo – 12 votes
6. Hardware review: Drobo – 11 votes
7. Big problems with the WD My Book Pro Edition II – 11 votes
8. The underrated Betta fish – 10 votes
9. WD TV is better than Apple TV – 10 votes
10. Using the economy as an excuse to shortchange employees – 10 votes

These are my top ten posts with the highest scores. The list is a combination of the highest rated and most rated lists. It’s the posts that have gotten the highest and most ratings.

1. Hardware review: Dell S2409W Flat Panel Display – 61 votes
2. Stranded in Frankfurt thanks to United Airlines – 21 votes
3. USPS Priority Mail is anything but that – 13 votes
4. How I got cheated on eBay – 14 votes
5. Hardware review: Second-Generation Drobo – 12 votes
6. Hardware review: Drobo – 11 votes
7. The underrated Betta fish – 10 votes
8. WD TV is better than Apple TV – 10 votes
9. Using the economy as an excuse to shortchange employees – 10 votes
10. Big problems with the WD My Book Pro Edition II – 11 votes

These are my ten lowest rated posts:

1. When it comes to home computers, k.i.s.s. and forget it! (1.00 out of 5)
2. Pet snakes in the Everglades(1.00 out of 5)
3. Elie Wiesel: biography of a Holocaust survivor (2.00 out of 5)
4. How many of my photos were stolen? (3.00 out of 5)
5. Why I turned off comments at Flickr (3.00 out of 5)
6. The Exakta EXA Ia analog camera (3.00 out of 5)
7. A lesson in civics and citizenship (3.00 out of 5)
8. Romania’s orphanages still a bad place for children (3.00 out of 5)
9. More about Cartoon Network (3.00 out of 5)
10. Fat clothes for fat people (3.29 out of 5)

It’s enlightening to see that some articles I care about happen to be on this last list, and it goes to show that no matter how attached I as an author can get to something I’ve written, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will resonate pleasantly with my readers.

It’s been an interesting experiment so far, and I plan to continue it.