You may notice, at the bottom of each page and post, that there is now a reader-interactive star-rating system which you can use to personally rate any of the said pages and posts.

This can seemingly be applied to any blog by its owner. I was a little dubious about it at first as it seemed from the spiel that it would only work on a blog such as Blogger, WordPress.com as hosted by WordPress, etc. However it appears to be working on my self-hosted WordPress blog without a problem.

(I’ve only recently installed it; so I’m not yet 100% clued up on it yet.)

How does this plugin help me as a blogger?

It allows my readers to provide feedback to give me some idea of the overall quality and/or their personal opinion of the content I’m publishing. This allows me to see which posts go down best with my captive audience. Up until now I have relied on visitor statistics alone. Whilst this provides some general guidance on the popularity of any particular post; it is a combination of the subject’s search popularity and the article’s quality: Many readers of the article may be arriving from Google or another search engine not knowing what they’ll find, just looking for advice. They’ll then read my article, followed by which they’ll think to themselves:

“"That was a good article”, “That article was total crap.”, or somewhere in between. One or two may comment, most won’t: They’ll either take or ignore the advice and browse on.

Now, however, the reader; whether they specifically came to my blog to read my article because they like my articles, or they just arrived from a search engine looking for advice, can give feedback with a single click of the mouse without having to bother about writing out text as to whether and why they thought it was a good or crap article.

(*Note: To be able to use the plugin properly you need to register with outbrain and get an outbrain key, which you’ll need to enter into the settings panel of your plugin/widget to activate it and to claim your site.)

The Outbrain plugin includes a widget too; which you can adjust to suit yourself as set out in the video below: -

Outbrain Tutorial: Changing your Blog Settings from Outbrain on Vimeo.

How does this plugin help you as a reader?

As I stated above; you can give feedback with a single mouse-click, rather than typing text in the form of a comment. It’s not compulsory, obviously; but if you like or hate it you can tell me easily.

I do still encourage comments of course; but if you’d rather not bother you can just click a star to give your opinion instead. Also everyone else who reads the article can see an aggregated opinion of what other readers thought of it too. While this isn’t a guide based totally upon expert opinions, it gives an overall idea of what the internet community in general think of it.

This text is copied from Digital Musings.com:

“A few points about the Outbrain Rating Widget:

• No registration required
• Installation is super-easy… we adjust the widget’s design to your blog’s look& feel automatically
• It’s absolutely FREE

You can get the Ratings Widget here. And the Developer Blog is here.

And yes, Don’t forget to Rate this Article! “

- So I do encourage other bloggers to adopt this for their own purposes.

I have no commercial interest in this product; so I’ll not be affected in any way whether you use it or not. At this point in time I would think that it would be a good idea to at least give it a try all the same.

The video below informs you how to read ratings reports generated by the plugin: -

Outbrain Tutorial: Blog Reports from Outbrain on Vimeo.

That’s all for now.

(I fully expect my internet stalker; Syphilis Syndrone (“Sarah Palin”) to go through all my entries rating each one “Poor”. I also expect that he’ll use more than one ip address to multiply-underrate each article. He’s a mindless alcoholic thug with a number of hang-ups who’s never grown up: If you see a single rating for every post, and it’s “Poor”, then you’ll know that I pre-empted him correctly.)