Breakfast Links: RateMyTeacher, Doxory and Smallest Apartments

Monday. Art.

So let’s start out with what, to me, seems like an incredibly bad idea. This site, RateMyTeachers.com let’s parents and students comment on their teachers. Seriously, it’s a place for kids - teenagers even - to comment and rate their teachers. Kids. Rate. Teachers. What possible use could this actually be? I checked out my own alma mater and couldn’t really find any of my old teachers except for Mr. Lamb, who I really liked - he had a 4.9 rating, which I think is out of 5, so that’s cool. There’s a student view and a parent view which shows there’s pretty much 0 ratings by parents and lots by students. Duh. I can’t wait till this site gets sued for libel. Oh, I just found Ms. Kastner who was super cool, too… she had a 4.8. Nice!

Moving on, we get to Doxory.com. Here we have a site that leverages that most powerful of tools, the wisdom of the crowds, and places it at your disposal to determine, perhaps, what you should have for lunch! That’s right, it’s pretty simple and sweet, you add in the question you need answered (must have exactly two possible answers) and people will let you know which one they think you should do. Great idea, but as far as I can tell, not enough uptake yet. Most of the ones I perused had at most a dozen responses - needs more crowd, more wisdom! I hope it gets it, because I need some help figuring stuff out.

Let’s finish up with apartment therapy’s 2nd annual smallest, coolest apartment contest (for 2006). I like this contest in principle more than in practice, although it’s still cool. I think the first 1st place winner, onespace, was genuinely cool and innovative. They had some crazy action going on taking full advantage of their double height ceiling. But, as a new yorker, I think that the cut off size of 650 sq feet, is waaay to big. You just don’t need to be that creative to live in a pad that size - cut that down to 500 and that’s where I’d like to see it, you gotta get some innovation to live in that space with any amount of stuff. They should have the contest in divisions or something.

Mar 19th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: web2.0