Reader Top 10s: an experiment in crowd pleasing
Try out our new voting system. Please
Site news In recent weeks, reghardware has run a series of top 10s - rounds up of "essential" or "best" apps and peripherals.
And very popular they have proved too, especially this one: Ten free apps to install on every new PC.
This prompted 187 comments, with readers in their dozens suggesting dozens more apps - and slating us for including iTunes for Windows on our list.
One commenter wrote to us to suggest that we put reader recommendations to the vote. This got us thinking and we came up with...a voting system.
Let's call it Voting Live Beta: it's clumsy - and we haven't figured out a good way yet to show the results. But then crowd-pleasing is very new to us.
Give Voting Live Beta twirl with the two articles below - and get sharing those recommendations. Also, please give us your feedback on the comments pages for this article - all suggestions for improvement most welcome.
Ten essential Android apps
reghardware has republished an article that went out on April 9. The original had a manageable number of comments for us to digest, but for boring reasons, we can't easily add voting on stories already published.
Top 10 iPhone games
Casuals or casualties? You the jury decides...maybe...
COMMENTS
Re: This is ridulous
I am baffled. They are two different, standalone articles! Different people will vote on different things.
If you have an iPhone and have a game to recommend it then do so.
If you don't have an Android phone, or have never owned an Android phone, you are not in a position to make a recommendation on that article.
Re: "but for boring reasons, we can't easily add voting on stories already published."
To be strictly accurate, yes we can... but the cost and time required outweighs the benefits.
Back to the future
It would be nice if the "back to the article" link took me back to page of the article where I cast my vote instead of the first page only.
Tipjip
"but for boring reasons, we can't easily add voting on stories already published."
Have you forgotten your audience?
We demand to know!
"The balance is always what is the most valuable use of the time/resources."
I think you misinterpreted the question. I suspect he was asking the same question as I was when I saw it.
Surely the "boring" reasons aren't boring to people who already go out of their way to understand these things? Not to say that you should add them to old articles, but that we want to to know why - curiosity etc etc.
We demand to know what the boring reasons are!
