An article on online reviewers has prompted me to get off my ass and write up some thoughts that have been percolating in my head for a few days.

If you are an enthusiastic consumer, there is no shortage of opportunities for you to write up reviews of the products you love or hate. Epinions has built a business out of hosting reviews. For Amazon, reviews are one advantage that it has over bricks-and-mortar retail outlets. And there are lots of other venues for reviews.

In some ways, though, a blog would be a better tool for writing reviews: you own the review, not the site hosting it. You’ve got all your reviews together in one place. Once you wrote the review, though, you’d want people to be able to see it at Amazon (or wherever), so there would need to be a review-aggregation mechanism. Austin Bloggers already works this way, more or less. I have Movable Type set up so that whenever I write a post in the “Austin” category, my blog pings Austin Bloggers, and Austin Bloggers creates a link back to my blog. And with All Consuming (which is very cool), we’ve got the nucleus of something like this happening.

But this is an area where the blogosphere needs to move forward if blogs are going to become a vehicle for reviews. Let’s look at what needs to happen:

Review profiles

Currently, blogs are set up as general-purpose writing tools: they don’t have specific fields for specific bits of information. Movable Type is going to come out with a “Pro” version that will support custom fields. I think of a set of custom fields as a “profile,” and I think this is the next thing in blogging. Bloggers writing reviews will need a “review profile” in their blogs with fields for the item code and rating.

Identifier

There needs to be some uniform way to refer to the product. This could be something like a uniform product code or an ASIN (though I don’t think this would work for movies). And there needs to be a standard way to enter this and publish this in a blog. As a practical matter, there might need to be multiple identification schemes; you would identify both the item and the scheme (eg, “this product code 12345, and I am using the Amazon standard identification number scheme”).

Ratings vocabulary

Not everyone uses the same scale for ratings. Some would give a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down. Others would give several numeric ratings for different aspects of a single product. In order for what review aggregation to work, there needs to be a uniform ratings vocabulary. Again, there should be a standardized field for this.

Aggregation API

Amazon already has a public API. There should be a mechanism for pinging Amazon (or whoever) “hey, I’ve written a review” so that it can aggregate your review into it’s product listings. Although All Consuming is run by an Amazon employee, even reviews posted there do not get into the Amazon database.

Feedback mechanism

Amazon makes it possible to indicate whether a review-reader finds a review helpful; Epinions goes further, and lets the reader write a review of the review. There would need to be something like trackback to get this information back into your review.

In theory, all this data structuring could be avoided if the aggregating entities used million-dollar search instead of million-dollar markup. It might be possible to just include a reference to an ASIN in a blog entry, ping Amazon, and have it figure out “hey, that’s a review of such-and-such” and to further use natural-language processing to figure out whether I liked it or not.

Nabokov never had this in mind.

Over the past week or so, many people with Movable Type blogs got hit by comment spam ostensibly posted by “Lolita,” linking to some nasty porno website. This has created a tizzy in the blogosphere, and happily, Jay Allen is doing something about it. Once he gets his plugin up and running, I plan on installing it. If only we could deal with e-mail spam as effectively.

Until he finishes, however, there’s something you can do right now. This comment spam is posted by an automated bot that looks for Movable Type’s comment cgi. You can change the name of this and cut the bot off at the knees. So here’s what you should do:

First, find the file “mt-comments.cgi” in your MT install and rename it something obscure (though I’d keep the .cgi ending).

The next steps you take are dependent on what version of MT you are running, and what version you were running when you created your blog templates, as MT has added some new tags for dealing with comments. If you have old blog templates, they will not use these tags; if you are running an old version of MT, you won’t have access to them anyhow. I’m not sure when these were instituted–I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure this out.

1. If your initial install of MT was relatively recent

This is the simplest situation: Open your mt.cfg file. Find the line that reads “# CommentScript mt-comments.cgi”. Remove the # and change “mt-comments.cgi” to whatever new name you have picked. Then rebuild all files in your blog or blogs.

2. If you are running a new install of MT with old templates

Your templates probably aren’t using MT’s special placeholder for the comments CGI. You can either change the hard-coded reference to mt-comments.cgi in each template to a hard-coded reference to the new file, or change it to “<MTCommentScript>”. In either case, once you’ve done this, go through and follow the instructions for 1 above.

3. If you are running an old version of MT

You will not be able to take advantage of the <MTCommentScript> tag at all. You will need to change the hard-coded reference to mt-comments.cgi in each template to a hard-coded reference to the new file, and then rebuild.

This sounds more complicated than it really is. It took me about 10 minutes to fix all my blogs.