Nice to hear that the crew here is conscious towards the issue.
The only thing that comes to mind is that whatever tracks popularity needs to be extremely simple since not everyone likes/bothers to write comments/reviews. It also needs to be unpolarized, since the rating system is already populated by extremists with 1s and 10s scores. Not saying that all those 1s and 10s aren't valid, but I hope you know what I mean.
How about simply a "Following/Have Read" button/counter that registered users can click (one time).
Then we could have have a popularity sorting function that can be applied by genre/genre combination like "Shoujo Drama by order of popularity".
And/or add a "favourite" button like the ones that exist for pictures/walls to extract those who liked it from those who simply read it. This might undermine the rating system however.
The last idea that I have in mind (for now) is to "tag" the registered members to create a minimum threshold to form a pool size. Coupled with the "Followed/Following" and "Favourite" buttons, only count the members who have read a certain amount (let's say 5) of the same genre to count, as well as add them to the "genre reader" pool.
Example: Let's say that I'm following 10 titles, 7 of which have Shoujo and 5 of which have Sci-Fi. If the threshold is 5, then I'm actively part of the "Shoujo" and "Sci-Fi" pools.
From the titles point of view, you could extract information like "of 10534 registered Shoujo readers (which I'm part of), 3451 are following/followed it and 954 have favoured it".
So now I have 3 facts: of the 99999999 registered members, 10534 hold the same interest, and 3451 have read this title.
1- 3451 out of 10534 is more significant to me than 3451 out of 99999999 members, since at least they're "active" readers of the said genre(s). 999999999-3451 = the "noise", since they don't even like Shoujo enough to follow the threshold amount of titles. Basically a third of Shoujo readers have read this, so it must be a popular title.
2- 954 have favoured it. "Favoured" must logically be a subset of 3451 to work. With this the user can judge that the said title is not only popular, but is liked.
I'm probably nagging at this point but I'd like to press the idea because:
1- It would set custom pool sizes for each genre and not have say shounens like "Naruto", "Berserk", etc. creaming out a shoujo like "Suzuka" -well, maybe not Suzuka (pretty popular imo), but say "Parfait Tic" out of the list when they're not even competing for the same audience.
2- Allow categorized popularity lists.
Then you can bring this further and add pie-charts and/or other graphs. One cool thing that I like and would like to point out is that mass of titles with size representing the popularity on the BlogSuki's main page. I find that pretty nifty. (www.blogsuki.com, but I'm sure you're aware of it).
Of course this is mainly a suggestion (might be a pain to code this), and the threshold will probably need to be bigger (I'm thinking somewhere between 10 and 25 titles of the genre the user needs to followed/following). I can picture the type of coding to do this with SQL, but I don't know what you're using, so it might be as easy as 1-2-3 or so hard that even plucking your eyeballs out would seem more fair.
Anyhoo, I'd be glad if you consider it. Heck, I'd be glad if anyone has read this post in its entirety... Damn, need to stop typing
Oh, I forgot to add, it would probably be best to have an option to "un-favour" a title the user could click for whatever reason. Makes the whole system more precise.
