Tuesday Thingers (a little late)

I was reading Wendi's blog and this week's Tuesday Thinger's question caught my eye, so I thought I'd blog about it, even if it isn't Tuesday.

Today's question: Do you use a rating system on your blog? How do you feel about using the rating system provided on sites like Library Thing and Amazon? When looking up information on a book you are interested in, do you use the ratings provided by these sites (or similar sites) to help you make the decision on purchasing the book?

For a while I was writing my reviews on Goodreads and then using their code on my blog. Their system includes a star rating. They define three stars as "I liked it" an that's the rating I gave most books I read. Most are average--if I didn't like them I didn't read them. I've given five star ratings to only a couple of books, and a four star is better than average. Then I started posting my reviews to Amazon and saw my three star reviews coming up in the negative reviews side. I figured out that for good books, five star reviews were the norm. Sorry, I read 2+ books a week. If I give most of them four star ratings there just isn't much room to go up.

When I started using Amazon links for graphics I quit putting ratings on my blog. I still use Goodreads and the star rating there, but it isn't on my blog any more.