Last week we unveiled a new Social Media Lab (SMiLey) rating system for our ongoing weekly reviews of various social networking sites and tools for scholars like Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net .  The reviews are available at http://socialmedialab.ca. Our hope is that this new rating system will make the reviews easier to read and more useful to our readers.

The SMiLey rating system is built around a set of 5 different characteristics: Site Purpose, Findability, Usability, Sociability and Popularity. Each characteristic is rated on a 5-point scale. Each point is represented by a smiley face. One smiley face represents a site that has major deficiencies and five smiley faces indicate a site that has little or no deficiency.

Read more about SMiLey at http://socialmedialab.ca/?p=422