package popularity ratings

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> Isn't any package popularity rating going to be hugely skewed such that
> the 'default install set' packages are basically always rated top, making
> rankings of dubious value

I personally see zero value in a flat popularity rating.
I would see more value if we could find a way to correlate users such
that I could datamine the application preferences of people who were
already running systems similar to mine.

For example, XFCE users as a breed might prefer certain applications
which are not 'popular' in the general userbase, but were immensely
popular inside the XFCE subculture. Those shared preferences would
never show up in a flat popularity rating..a rating destined to be
dominated by FVWM2 users...so such a flat rating would never really be
what XFCE users would find value in.

But if we had a way to correlate a systems/usages/people with other
systems/usages/people which are mostly similar, then we have something
interesting as a metric...a metric that can support both common and
niche subgroups..based solely on individual usage cases or habits.
That way XCFE users, would end up correlating with other XCFE users
and would have the software 'popularity' ranking biased by that
correlation.

It would end up being dynamic, in that as your usage patterns changed,
how you would correlate with others would change as well without
anyone elses habits changing.

Centralization of 'popularity' is simply not flexible enough to be
interesting in the brave new world of the social network.

-jef"Did i mention that I hate social networking"spaleta