Farhad Manjoo

We live in an age under constant review. We rate — and consult other ratings of — local businesses on Yelp, movies on Netflix, music on iTunes, hotels on Tripadvisor, and books and everything else on Amazon, the whole world surveyed and sliced-up on a five-star scale. The ratings are often enormously helpful; you might even argue they’ve revolutionized the very nature of shopping and the culture itself, bringing something like empirical precision to a marketplace otherwise suffused in P.R. and spin. Yelp will point you to the small produce shop with better and cheaper apples than the giant supermarket nearby, and Amazon shows you that a $21 chef’s knife is every bit as good as a $125 model.

But sometimes, as my experience at Fred’s shows, reviews and star ratings fail to capture and convey something essential — something essentially bad — about a product or place. Why? Researchers looking into the question have lately come upon some intriguing ideas about why ratings don’t capture the true measure of a product. Their findings suggest that the five-star scale may be an outmoded way of representing consumer sentiment; and now a few Web companies are designing ways to make ratings much more useful.

Online ratings are beset by one main flaw, something pollsters call “response bias.” Because people are more likely to rate products that have moved them in some way — either positively or negatively — ratings for most items brim with extreme opinions. On Yelp everyone is above average; company CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told me that 85 percent of local businesses on the site get a three-star or better average rating. Stoppelman’s explanation for this — truly bad businesses don’t stay open very long — makes sense, but it turns out that Amazon, too, attracts a lot of happy people. Last year, three information systems analysts, Nan Hu, Paul Pavlou and Jennifer Zhang, studied the ratings of 230,000 books, almost 300,000 DVDs and 60,000 videos for sale at the site. The average in each category was over four stars — which makes sense only if you believe Hollywood is making mostly great movies. When the researchers mapped the reviews on a graph, they found J-shaped curves — there were a lot of one-star ratings, very few twos and threes, a whole lot of fours, and a king’s ransom of fives.

To see how an Amazon star-rating compares to society’s “true” opinion, Hu, Pavlou and Zhang conducted their own survey of one product, singer-songwriter Jason Mraz’s 2005 album, “Mr. A-Z.” In a survey of 66 college students, about two-thirds gave the album three or four stars. There were also a bunch of twos, some ones, and very few fives. On Amazon the picture is completely different. More than half of reviewers judge “Mr. A-Z” a five-star CD, while there are only a small number of threes, twos and ones.

Pavlou explains the lovefest by citing a specific kind of response bias, what he calls “purchasing bias.” In order to review something, you must have already purchased it. But people buy stuff they think they’re going to like — that’s why they buy stuff. If you cringe every time you hear the overplayed Jason Mraz track “The Remedy,” you won’t buy “Mr. A-Z,” and so your probably negative opinion will go unrecorded by Amazon. Purchasing bias, Pavlou points out, is related to the price of a product; a higher price reduces the probability that someone who is unlikely to enjoy a product will buy it and review it anyway. Think about it this way: If the Jason Mraz album was $200 rather than $11, then only die-hard fans would buy it and rate it, skewing its average review higher. Purchasing bias thus suggests some helpful advice when you’re looking at online ratings: The more expensive a product, Pavlou says, the more you should discount its high reviews.

The market for reviews is thriving, with a host of start-ups pinning their fortunes on showing customers what people really think about a product. One of the most innovative is a firm called Summize, which has developed a clever way to highlight how response bias affects any product’s reviews. Summize crawls the Web for product ratings — currently, it scans only Amazon, but soon it will be looking at other sites and blogs — and then it translates those ratings into a “heat map” rather than a five-star scale. The heat map for “Mr. A-Z” looks like this: showSnip(“product”,”jason mraz mr. a-z”,120,9);. — a small colored bar that goes from red on the left to green on the right, showing the full breakdown of one- to five-star ratings. It tells you whether only true fans are rating the product, or if you might like it too.

The heat map doesn’t eliminate response bias, but it lets you take it into account when making decisions, according to Summize’s founders. Say you’re looking for a KVM switch — a little doohickey that lets you use one keyboard, mouse and monitor for multiple computers. If you search on Amazon for “KVM switch,” you see, right up there at the top, the IOGEAR MiniView Micro. It’s just 23 bucks, and a 113 customers give it an average rating of four stars. Seems like something you don’t even have to think about — cheap, good, sold.

Look up the same product on Summize, though, and you see the clear split in the reviews: showSnip(“product”,”iogear kvm switch”,120,9);. There are lots of fives and fours, but also a large number of ones. And when you dig down into these one-star ratings, you find something interesting. Several people complain that the switch doesn’t seem to work with IBM ThinkPads, Toshibas or Macs — a flaw completely obscured by the four-star rating. In this way, says Greg Pass, Summize’s CTO, the site helps you find “the wisdom in the crowd,” rather than the collective “wisdom of the crowd.”

Amazon displays an average rating at the top of each of its product pages, but it has recently added a small distribution map low on the page, near the reviews of each product; the map shows how many ratings of each star-category a product has received. Jeremy Stoppelman says that Yelp has also considered adding this feature. But Stoppelman and others at Yelp also have another bit of advice about star ratings — that it’s wise to look past them and to judge a product or a place according to the people reviewing it, not how many stars it gets. It’s the people, not the stars, who shine on Yelp; you can find some wonderful writers here, sharp and funny and full of firm opinions about the little diners, hideaway bodegas, fun candy stores, and mean shopkeepers who populate urban life. The best part is that you can follow them just like on any other social-networking site — see reviewers’ links to other people, their opinions on other places, a trove of personal data that gives you some sense of whether someone else’s opinion will match yours.

Yelp has completely altered the fortunes of some local businesses. I called up Pat Ryan, the owner of San Francisco’s Pat Ryan Moving and Storage, which has a five-star Yelp rating, better than just about any other business in the city. He told me that Yelp doubled his business during the past year — he’s had more than 200 customers come to him through the site. Yelp, he added, has kept him vigilant about customer service; because every one of his customers can review his company, Ryan has gone to great lengths to keep people happy. He gets enough calls to put out six moving trucks on the weekend, but he usually sends out three — he turns people away, he says, because if he gets stretched too thin, his service, and thus his Yelp reviews, might fall.

Other businesses, though, report a less salutary experience. Fior D’italia Restaurant, in North Beach, is the oldest Italian restaurant in the country and a pretty popular place besides. On Yelp, though, it rates 2.5 stars. Chris Ritchie, the manager, told me that he’s looked at the rating, and he shakes his head at how disconnected Yelpers are from his customers. People on Yelp think his food is “bland,” it’s “disgusting,” it just plain “sucks.” (One person, though, calls it “the best Italian food I’ve ever had.”) But Ritchie says that his best customers are tourists, and though they love Fior D’italia Restaurant, they’re not taking the time to post their reviews because Yelp isn’t important to them. In other words, he blames response bias.

I’ve never been to Fior D’italia Restaurant, so don’t know what to think. The thing is, though, the Yelp rating put me off. And I’m put off for the same reason I was attracted to Fred’s. In a world of dizzying choice, where there are more movies, books, songs, shops — more blasted things of all kinds — we need other people to help us out. You may understand, intuitively, that a five-star rating doesn’t guarantee happiness; but what other guidance do you have? Last year, inspired by Yelp, I hired Pat Ryan when moving from my apartment. His men did a terrific job. Sometimes, five stars is really that.

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

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Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”