more like this?

In my original vision, Rayt would only allow you to comment on a website as well as rayt the comments of other users. Joe recently met with Brian O'Neill, and using the successful review site, yelp, as a model, they explored the possibility of rayting websites themselves.

On yelp, you can rate anything in your community from restuarants to hotels to pet hospitals - and you can rate them just by giving them one to five stars or by giving them a star rating + a review. Yelp is an extremely popular (and useful) website and it may very well be because of the two rating options it offers its users.   I think this is because yelp makes it easy for those users who otherwise wouldn't write reviews to still contribute to the yelp community by choosing how many stars they think a service deserves.

In theory, on Rayt, this same structure could also work. As an alternative to leaving a comment on a site, you could make a simple 1-5 rayting of the site itself. This would allow for greater flexibility for users and as a result a lot more websites would get rayted. Plus, people who might at first have been hesitant to write comments could become familiar with the site through the rayting feature and eventually start adding comments, too.

I think the combination of qualitative (comments) and quantitative (rayting) data will allow for a more useful Rayt system.

1. The Rayting is the most basic way to rayt a web site. You assign the web site a number value between 1 (worst) and 5 (best) and you're done. It'll take you about 10 seconds to leave a rayting. Raytings are most appropriate for users who want to quickly rayt a site without taking the time to write a comment. The number of raytings left by users will be averaged to give the page an overall rayting which will be displayed in an icon on your toolbar. The icon will contain from 1 to 5 stars and that will give you a quick idea of what other users think of the site.

2. The Comment is a more in-depth way to rayt a web site. It is an opportunity for you to express an opinion about the web site or present information about the site to other users. People will be able to rayt your comment from 1 to 5, the same scale people use to rayt the site as a whole. You will also be able to rayt and view the comments of other users.

Of course, users are encouraged to leave both a rayting and a comment, since that gives other users the most information.