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GoodGuide.com has released a scientist’s take on socially responsible ratings guides. Learn about this and other socially responsible guides on our updated Research Guide. That is where you can find ways to contribute that take as little as two minutes of your time!

Dara O’Rourke’s U. Berkeley based research guide has been the whispered about “elephant in the room” in the socially responsible rating guide circles for a while now. This week they launched GoodGuide.com to Wired fanfair. I’m not sure why they have rated so many of the micro-reviews for products as 10/10 (is that the default when no information is present?), but overall it’s an impressively detailed presentation of mashed up research about the cosmetics industry. Good work!

The really good news is that Dara has suggested that his platform will eventually include an open API so that all of the information presented will be able to be used by our own system as well. (We just released our open API last week!)

So with all of these seemingly redundant services… what does bilumi have to offer that is truly unique? Believe it or not we’re the only service in the dozens that I have found that is seeking to provide consumers with customized ratings based on a realistic model of a product’s supply chain. Part of being customized is presenting the opinions and research of people like you. But it’s too much to ask hundreds of volunteers to do hefty research. It’s much easier to add to our system by looking through other review sites and quoting what you find there. That’s why our Research Guide lists how long it will take to perform different kinds of volunteer tasks. When it comes down to it, all of these other services really do help us get closer to our vision!

And… a peek at what’s to come for bilumi… we’ve been casually collaborating on making technology with Consumer Gadget - the European solution to structured supply chain data. More on this soon!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 11:07 am by Clay and is filed under Journal, Related News. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.