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ETS has a new hot teams paper on Social Ratings at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/hot-team/hot-team-social-ratings/

Social rating tools are those which allow users to rate content of items in a "repository" (e.g. a book on Amazon, a song on iTunes, a blog news post). Other users can rely on the aggregate results to determine what the overall opnion of an item. For instance, I may pick a week-end movie based on reactions from other viewers on opening weekend. For me this ties in to the aggregate decision making models discussed in The Wisdom of Crowds

The Hot Team discusses the educational implications as well as some possible methodological errors.