Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Barack Obama may be slipping in the polls, but he’s still the most popular politician, according to a new semantically enabled service from starMedia.

The service, dubbed Top People, comes up with its rankings by tallying up Internet users’ opinions on different websites, then measuring that to rank well-known figures from movies to politics to sports and beyond.

With 14,889 opinions in, 68 percent of them favorable, Obama leads No. 2 Bill Clinton and No. 3 Sarah Palin (62 percent favorability rating). When you click on a personality, you’ll be given an index of their particular star ratings in various departments, from intelligence to personality to empathy that make up the semantic tag cloud that drives the categorization of users’ opinions. Turns out Barack lags Sarah with just two stars in the Style category, but somehow the two also tie with five stars each on intelligence.

It’s OK if you don’t agree with that perception, though. The site draws its conclusions based on Internet opinions being expressed around the web, as well as directly on the site, and it lets you give a good or bad rating of others’ opinions that impact scores in each of these areas. Additionally, users can recommend their own web sites from which the service can draw additional data.

You might be interested to know that the top worst-rated people in politics are former president George W. Bush and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, followed by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain. That points to starMedia’s heritage as a global portal originally designed to connect and inform Spanish speakers with local operations through South America, Spain, and certain U.S. markets. The Top People service seems to still have some kinks to work out in completing its translation of some functions into English from Spanish, but not enough to deter most native English speakers from giving it a whirl.

Opinion aggregation

The service is powered by Swotti, a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions, and uses relevant characteristics to measure reputations – people in this instance, but it can do the same for movies, products, countries, and so on. Users can visit Swotti directly at swottie.com to search opinions across those categories, and webmasters can add a widget to embed Swotti search in their own sites. Swotti has mapped certain terms to its semantic tags, such as ugly or sexy to image and genius to intelligence, though I’m still puzzling over what appears to be the word famous’ link to style.

On Top People, it’s a little unclear as to how Swotti is coming to each conclusion – for instance, a one-star rating on a particular characteristic may appear red and be considered disappointing, where in another instance a person may rate one green star, which equates to “poor.” Other categories Top People ranks include people involved in the music, movie, fashion, sports, business, art, religion, and humanities areas. Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie are among the top rated in the movies sector, but somehow Ashley Tisdale has worked her way into the No. 2 spot. Not that I have anything against her, but of all the movie personalities in the world she generally isn’t among the top that come to my mind.

Of course, given the number of teenagers that see in her something they’d probably like to be-and the number of them who flock to the web to share their feelings about their media idols-it’s probably not surprising that Tisdale pulls into a leading spot. That makes you less likely to question the semantic technology behind this but perhaps more likely to question the overall point to the service – although probably the only point to it really is whiling away some of the less interesting minutes at work.

starMedia in its press release noted that it gives users a way to see how celebrities’ ratings change as news or scandals break about them, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to compare someone’s ranking a week ago to today – as you might be looking to do given the recent Miley Cyrus pole-dancing incident.

starMedia is putting some fun into semantics with Top People, and for a Friday summer afternoon, that might just be enough.

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