When ratings are positive, everything is great. However, ratings can be problematic and unfair when they are negative.

At MyMindshare, negative ratings aren’t necessarily a value judgment on the worth of a bidder’s web page. A negative rating simply means that the bid isn’t being targeted to the right people.

The rating system at MyMindshare is a 1-5 scale where a thumbs-up is a 5 and a thumbs-down is a 1. The rating is simply an average of all the thumbs.

In order to treat poorly rated bids fairly, a minimum of three stars is displayed on the site. It’s our opinion that showing less than 3 stars creates an unfair negative bias toward the bid. So even if a bid has a 1.0 rating, the bid will appear with 3 stars.

Even though the stars are a 3-5 scale, the rating is still a 1-5 scale, and the bids are ordered by the rating. A bid with a 1.0 rating will have 3 stars, but will appear at the bottom of the list.

Added two affiliates today. The first is for the greater San Diego region, and the second is for the city of La Mesa.

I don’t know if “affiliate” is a good term to use for the MyMindshare affiliates.

There are two kind of MyMindshare affiliates. There are internal affiliates like Online Marketing and there are external affiliates like WehoNews. Technically, affiliates may be co-brands.

I think affiliate is the right term.

I have taken a break from blogging for quite a while now, but it’s time to get back into it.

The reason in not that I feel compelled to express myself. The reason is that I am working on marketing MyMindshare, and blogging is going to be a necessary component.

For the last week or so, I have been retooling MyMindshare to make it friendly to search engines. The goal is to make MyMindshare a useful tool for search engine optimization. Specifically, I changed the link on the bid text to go directly to a bidder’s site, instead of the bid page. Now, you have to click on the bid amount to go to the bid page to accept a bid.

The other thing I am doing is search-engine-optimizing the affiliate sites. The leading example is Online Marketing. My goal is for the Online Marketing Directory to appear on page 1 of search results for “online marketing.”

The following comes from George Gilder‘s book Telecosm, written ten years ago, but I just finished reading it for the first time. Since I tend to read his books ten years after initial publication, and he seems to be at least ten years ahead of himself, we are both right on time.

In a world where advertisements are read only by people who choose to read them, the quality sharply improves. Freed from the meretricious need to appeal to passing strangers, advertisers ascend to a higher cultural level. The hokiness and smarm we associate with Madison Avenue dissipates and the advertiser makes an honest effort to convey as much information as possible in as compelling as possible a style. Advertising becomes an art of truth rather that an art of deceit.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121452513

Here in the United States, an office of the Pentagon held an unusual contest earlier this month. Researchers wanted to see how thousands of people around the world could compete and collaborate to solve a problem that was too big for any one individual. The task was to find balloons scattered around the U.S. Competitors posted information and misinformation on Twitter and other social networking sites. Dr. Peter Lee is with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sponsored the contest.

How’s this:

MyMindshare is an online marketing system that effectively and meaningfully connects marketers with consumers. It combines a bidding system like Google Adwords with a rating system like Digg.com with simplicity and usability like Craigslist. By harnessing the built-in incentives of a free market, MyMindshare aligns the interests of both marketers and consumers so that they can get together on equally valuable terms.

Ad agencies 15 years ago didn’t want to know whether or not their ads had actually been read, they told us. This was simply because if an advertiser discovered that few, if any, people were actually reading their ad on page 113, the company might just pull that ad and save their money, taking revenue away from the ad agency in the process. The entire ability to sell an ad-edit ratio of 75 percent which was needed to qualify for printed distribution by second class mail – yet another buggy whip in a digital era was based on this deliberate ignorance. Ad agencies and publications alike knew that many — even most — advertising dollars were simply wasted, but it wasn’t in their interest to admit that, so they didn’t.

Contrast this to pay-per-click, which is brutally honest, where every successful ad has efficacy and advertisers have a pretty darned good idea what they are getting for their money. This reality is precisely why ad-supported magazines, newspapers, and television are losing revenue. It is a trend that is likely to continue, and can only result in a degradation of production standards on the print side to match the reduced revenue potential of the online business, where BS gives way to measurable, though impoverished, results.

via I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Apple and the Future of Publishing – Part One – Cringely on technology.

At MyMindshare.NET I have created Websites for Non-Techies, which is a simple web site service for those who are technically challenged.

If you know anybody who needs a web site, but doesn’t know how to go about it, send them to MyMindshare.net.