If you’re at the WordCamp SF 2011 conference right now, and would like to hear how we evolved into the idea for MoodThingy from our experiences on 8Asians, please vote for us by sending an SMS “2″ to 858-333-8833. How very American Idol!
MoodThingy is a way to harness the overt emotional reactions of your audience. It does so currently with three parts:
Better than a binary “like” or “dislike,” this handy rating widget offers a “shades of gray” scale, so to speak. In just one click, readers can indicate how the content made them feel: amused, fascinated, excited, angry, sad or bored.
Interestingly, in piloting this widget on 8Asians.com, we’ve found that it may be encouraging feedback from lurkers and reducing flame bait from trolls. Or, perhaps those trolls are rating themselves bored of the posts instead. (More on our experiences with the MoodThingy widget later.)
The widget is currently a WordPress plugin that automatically appears on an individual post as soon as you sign up and get a Website ID and API Key. If you’re familiar with CSS, you can customize it to better suit your site.
See which pieces of content excite, amuse, or bore your readers through an internal dashboard. Knowing which topics & events are most engaging can help you create better content. Use this data to learn about the interests of your audience, decide which types of stories to chase, or even encourage your writers as an internal leaderboard. (“A lot of our readers are bored with your posts this week, Mike. Better find some more interesting topics…”)
You can sort by mood and number of votes in the past day, week, or month. The graphical bar graph above the moods can also be toggled on or off.
Since the widget is currently a WordPress plugin, the internal dashboard will appear in your WordPress admin as well as on moodthingy.com. We’ll be evolving this dashboard as we build out support for more platforms too.
Feature the articles that your readers have determined to be the most exciting, heartbreaking, or amusing on your site. Mood-based ratings, with their ease of use & anonymity, are a better indicator of true interest in an article than other common metrics, such as pageviews (which can be influenced by SEO and keyword usage) and comments (not everyone writes a comment and not all comments are a true vote of interest). This makes the MoodThingy widget a good complement or replacement to typical “Most Popular” modules.
As hinted in the previous section, other features could be built off the MoodThingy data as well. Oh the possibilities…
So what do you think so far? Is there anything else you’d like to see? We already have a long list, but we would love to hear your suggestions as well. Thanks!
When Mike and I worked at a certain Internet company that ends with an exclamation point, user generated content was a hot commodity with the executives. They even had a little acronym they would throw around — UGC — as a way properties could add perceived value: “We would love it if this property had 75% UGC by Q4, 2009.” Hearing this in meetings would always make me roll my eyes, not only because the acronym UGC sounds like the word “UGG,” but they made it sound so easy to create a community to static content – a “just add water” solution that would suddenly make any media property a bustling, automated community web site.
Also: 75% more UGG. I mean, come on, now.
In the case of their news portals, the solution seemed obvious: articles, which were produced by the AP, or an in-house team, would all have unfiltered comments. The place I worked had a proprietary login system, even the ability to create an avatar of yourself. What could go wrong?
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Welcome to the MoodThingy blog!
This is my first post. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Um, ahem.
Great things are coming soon. Stay tuned.