A Startup A Day

Anyone remember that old episode of The Simpsons where the teachers at Springfield Elementary go on strike?  Bart loves it (until Marge becomes his substitute), but Lisa starts freaking out.  She walks around the house crying “Look at me! Grade me! Evaluate and rank me! I’m good, good, good and oh so smart!”

My idea is a universal platform that would allow people to easily insert a 1-5 ranking onto a blog post, MySpace page, online picture or video, etc…  Many sites already have this in place on their own site, but Rate Me would be a centralized platform that would allow content creators to easily insert a little javascript into any piece of web content to get an instant rating mechanism.

Here’s a quick example:

This works on two levels.  First, for people who create content, they get good feedback on what their users like and dislike.  For instance, I could tag the ideas on my blog and get a sense as to which ideas people liked (hi mom!) versus those they didn’t like (jerks).

Second, for people who consume content, you’d be able to have a history of the types of content that you liked/disliked.  You could pull up a list of any content you tagged as 5 star, for example, and be able to go back to those sites (similar to del.li.c.io.u.s – I can never figure out the .’s).  Even better, over time the system could start to make links between content tags and your likes/dislikes and begin to suggest other content that you might like as well.  You could even start to add in some Web 2.0-ish features like “Show me other people who have similar likes/dislikes”(shout out to Steve P’s new venture – can’t wait to see how that progresses!)

What do you guys think?  1 star?  Why are my bones are so brittle, I always drink plenty of…”Malk”?