Blog

Those of you who participate on the WOT forum and blog know that we enjoy providing a place where people can share their knowledge and experiences regarding websites. As our community is growing, we want to develop WOT further by letting you communicate easily with other users and share interesting and fun stuff with them.

But before our development team starts its work we would like to hear your ideas: what social activities would you like to have? What information would you like to share with and see about other members? If you have your own website, would you like to have widgets, badges and banners from WOT? We just added a list of Top 20,000 Websites by Popularity – what else would you like to see from our database? What about the user levels and rewards?

Here are some things we have been thinking about:

• Public profile that you can customize. Can include photo/avatar, location, bio, areas of interest. What else?
• Friends, we could "introduce" people with things in common.
• User levels and activity scores. How should we differentiate the levels? Examples could be: gold – silver – bronze; expert – experienced – novice; How about icons to represent the levels?
• Comments, you can post your own and receive comments from others.
• Statistics like top users, top websites and community statistics.
• Recommendations from other users when you are searching something.
• Scorecard where you can see all the ratings you have made. Ratings can be added, changed or deleted.
• Website Ownership Claim with authentication. Site owner has a specific place for comments in the scorecard.
• Widgets, banners and badges to add to your own blog or website.

Please share your ideas on the forum and participate in building Web of Trust!

WOT's goal is to make the Internet a safer place for everyone, and our new colorblind accessible version provides a security tool for the 7% of the population (that's 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women) who have color vision deficiency. The traffic light colors of our add-on are difficult for most colorblind people to discern so everything from the color schemes to the product’s rating icons to the whole symbol language was designed to meet the optimal needs of the colorblind.

We are very proud of this innovative new design, and we think that we've raised the bar to higher industry standards for accessibility with this release. If you agree, please share it with your friends and give us a digg and a stumble.

WOT's colorblind version is not only useful, but it's interesting to look at. Watch our cool new demo video which explains more.

Listen to a podcast conversation between our CEO, Esa, and Ville Kolehmainen, Chief Creative Officer of Design Agency FUSION.

Communication is important to us at Web of Trust. After all, we aren't just a website reputation rating service, but a community working together to make the web a safer place. Whether we're making a comment on a site's scorecard or participating on the forum or blog, talking to one another is what makes people-driven security work.

Today we debut our newsletter, Inside MyWOT. Please take a few minutes to look it over, and let me know what you think. Inside MyWOT is about our community, so I invite you to submit your stories and share your Web of Trust experiences. Write me at deborah@mywot.com.

Get Inside MyWOT now

Which site is the most popular with WOT users?

If you guessed Google, then you’re right. According to our new list of most popular sites frequented by WOT users, Google’s search engine has occupied the top spot for the past 30 days. The list also shows that our users often visit social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Visit our list of Top Sites (there's 20,000 of them!) , view the reputation scorecard and leave comments - all in one place.

Bill Mullins is an advocate of WOT's people-driven security (in fact, he’s the one who coined the phrase!), and in his latest blog post on TechThoughts he emphasizes the importance of WOT members' participation. He says, “We are all responsible for each other’s security on the Internet.”

Read his blog here

Please help us spread the word about WOT to others by voting for Bill's review on digg and bookmarking it on the sites below.

In an effort to educate parents and teachers about the usefulness of WOT in helping keep kids safe on the Internet, I participated in my first podcast recently. 8falcons, a site specializing in online safety education for children asked me for an interview, so I dusted off my voice and squeaked an enthusiastic, "Yes!"

Hear the result, and pass it on to any teachers or parents you know who could benefit from having WOT as part of their Internet security.

Listen to the podcast (8.23 minutes)

The beta versions of the WOT 3.0 add-on and scorecard were published about two weeks ago. We received some valuable improvement ideas and made changes based on them. I want to thank everyone for the feedback and comments given - all of them are considered.

Here is a list of the improvements:

• When a scorecard comment is edited, all the votes on that comment are removed.
• When the “I agree” or “Flag a comment" buttons are clicked then both buttons are disabled. This is simply because it's not logical to agree with and flag the same comment.
• The “Good/Bad shopping experience” categories have been renamed to “Good/Bad customer experience”.
• The language selection on the bottom now opens only when it's clicked.
• Only registered members can leave comments. Previously all site visitors could leave comments but the comments from non-registered members were not visible to others. Thus the information was basically lost. So, if you want to comment, please register first. In any case please use the add-on to rate the sites. It's the only way to make the web safer for all of us.
• You can now sort the comments. Click the column header and the comments are then sorted by that column.
• On the top of the scorecard is a hidden Ask WOT field. Click the domain name and a field will appear where you can write a domain name. Press enter and you will be sent to the domain's scorecard.
• Direct links to the comments have been implemented. An open comment contains a link to that comment, like this [link to this comment].

We added this functionality because of your suggestions. Thanks once again for all the feedback you have given, we value it very much. If you have any further suggestions we would be happy to receive them and investigate if they could be added to the site or the WOT add-on.