ITWire

The patent skirts around this, suggesting that "a reviewer can predict that a particular puzzle game in an online application store will be in the top 50 overall chart, will be in the top 5 of the games subdomain, and will be the number 1 for teens aged 13-18. The reviewer can also provide different reviews associated with each ranking prediction, each review being targeted to the expected interests of a particular subdomain." That sounds like a lot of extra work for little reward (trust me: you can make more money per hour stacking supermarket shelves than you can conducting reviews for commercial media if you're doing the job thoroughly).

Another issue is that an individual can find value in reviews written by people they disagree with. For example, there used to be a film critic whose tastes were almost diametrically opposite mine. If he bagged a movie, there was a pretty good chance that I'd enjoy it. But under the scheme covered by the patent application, if he wasn't very good at predicting the audience, his reviews would be buried: "The system presents in the electronic store received feedback from at least one individual whose predictive ranking coincides with the actual ranking of the item". So that doesn't help me.

It seems to me that the method set out in this patent application would motivate reviewers to 'think average' rather than 'think different'.