A Former Newbie Looks Back and Shares
Nov 19 '00 (Updated Nov 21 '00)
How I Got Here
YourDailyFreebies.com brought me to Epinions. The story is a web marketer’s dream and corroboration of the viral nature of the way web services are marketed. A post on the freebie site led me to another site that was giving free magazine subscriptions for trying them out. I had already been to several such sites, and the only magazine they offered that appealed to me was Wired. I had read Wired at the very beginning, but like Rolling Stone, the magazine went through a period of taking itself too seriously and I dropped my subscription.
The infamous Epinions article was in the second issue I received.
That article’s URL follows this post if you haven’t had the pleasure. Although other sites were mentioned, I found Epinions’ depth and flexibility appealing. Surely I’ll just jump in and get my feet wet, I thought. After all, I first began using online services in 1986 and worked at several during the late 1980s. I know the score.
Boy, was I wrong.
Epinions does have that small community feel of the early days on Compu$erve, The Source and Q-Link. That sort of group spawns infighting and elitism, to say nothing of cliques, but it also creates passion, and in Web parlance, stickiness. Oh, the places you’ll go today with a sticky web site!
Why I’m Writing This Essay
When someone new, even someone with years of experience, first comes to the site, their first impulse is to think, Oh yeah, I can do that. The old saw is true. You know the story of the surgeon telling a novelist at a cocktail party, “I’ve always wanted to take some time off and write a book” met by the novelist responding, “You should. I’ll be using my vacation to practice brain surgery this year so there’s an opening.”
The fact is that anyone can just jump in and start posting Epinions and reading and rating others. Doing those things well is another matter. And I don’t mean doing them well in terms of strictly adhering to The Elements of Style or using a rigid and arbitrary rating system. I mean becoming a member of the community who provides a service to that communal effort and extracts a reward, either emotional, financial or a combination, for that service.
But before I really started probing the site hard three months or so ago, I really didn’t understand many of the nuances. I wrote a number of Epinions very quickly, too quickly, and I’m not proud of them. I leave them up as a reminder to me of how not to post. I also posted in the wrong places and made some comments on posts about the system that I didn’t really understand. Watch and learn would be the best advice I could give you if you’re starting out. I know you’re anxious to get going, but take your time and ease into the site.
On this, my 50th Epinion, I think I have enough of a handle on the system and its many vagaries to author a primer of sorts for those coming behind me. I am now considering myself a “full-fledged” Epinionator, no longer a newbie, and I want to consolidate a lot of what I’ve learned from the ones who came before me to make it easier for the ones coming later. This will be a long post, so you’re welcome to bail out now, but you’ll miss the fun. At the very least, you’ll miss the opportunity to rate the essay.
Web of Trust & Ratings – Functioning On Different Planes
This may be the single hardest element with which a newbie grapples. What’s the difference between a Web of Trust and a review rating and how do they interrelate?
Simply put, the Web of Trust is a list of people in whose work here you have implicit faith. Everyone on Epinions has a ranking dedicated to the number of people who trust them. Like a multi-level marketing scheme, the Web of Trust proliferates three layers down. That simply means that if Person A trusts Person B, then Person A also “somewhat” trusts everyone that Person B trusts and “slightly” trusts everyone trusted by the people trusted by Person B. You can see how a ranking system of trust, rather than a simple count of the number of people, can determine placement and other important issues.
Rating an Epinion is different. When you rate a particular post, you are assigning it one of four categories: Highly Recommend, Recommend, Somewhat Recommend and Not Recommended. Epinions makes the very confusing statement, “Opinion ratings are based on your Web of Trust, not the Opinion Recommendation Summary”. Well yes, but when all other variables are held constant, the rating does determine placement. That’s only natural – if 10 people rate something you wrote as “Recommended” and those same 10 people rate another post on the same topic as “Highly Recommended”, the latter is going to be positioned above yours.
But there’s another variable here – the rater’s perceived strength. The ratings of Epinions’ Advisors, prolific users ostensibly recruited to “coach new users”, have much more weight than the ratings of typical users in their categories. Likewise, I suspect but cannot prove that each user carries a modifier based on their Web of Trust and that modifier also impacts the strength of the individual rating throughout the system.
All These People Have A Gazillion Hits. How Do I Do That?
“These people” are working hard to build their hit counts. Many read and rate dozens upon dozens of reviews every day – frequently on topics that don’t even interest them. They are prolific writers – many times submitting a review every 1-3 days. They also tend to write longer, more trusted reviews and build up a readership. Let’s face it; if 200 people trust you and a total of 150 get emailed notices of when you write, you’re going to generate a lot of reading. Even at 10 posts a month, you can figure on 2,000 member reads for just your new stuff at that kind of level. Yes, it will take several months of hard work to get there. You must read and rate as much as you can.
I won’t leave this section without mentioning the importance of comments. Leaving comments is a way of communicating directly with the author – the person who felt enough passion about a product or a service to spend time writing about it. Don’t leave vapid or empty comments; that’s a turnoff and looks to many like you’re simply trying to gain attention. Instead, if you have something to contribute, do so. I have yet to run across an Epinions person who doesn’t like reading relevant and thoughtful comments on their work. My favorite comment was from a woman who didn’t agree with a book review I wrote. When I emailed and asked her to explain, she sent me back a two page letter that must have taken her an hour to write. The letter was beautifully written, and in the end, she actually swayed me to her way of thinking. Comments are great.
But the big key here is to read and rate as much as you can. I subscribe to over 90 Epinion writers. I know others subscribe to many more. I read them all – and some of them write daily! But I do something even a little more different that I’ll share with you. Every time I read a review – and I spend a lot of time in the “Just In” section – I’ll read and rate at least one other related opinion. Related opinions are the ones that show up at the bottom of the opinion you’re reading. If I know one of the author’s involved, I’ll pick that person. Otherwise, a good headline or lead will cause me to click. Doing this not only broadens my presence on the site, but gives me an outstanding perspective on how the standards have evolved here over time. That sounds like a brilliant segue to:
Okay, So How Do You Rate Different Posts?
Ah, the ever-present “here’s how I rate stuff”. I’m going to keep mine as short as possible. I personally view Epinions as a series of product reviews with some essays mixed in. When I read an Epinion, I’m looking for knowledge that I can take away and apply in my everyday life. Thus, I may not be in the market for a DVD player today, but I’ll read the Epinion and decide whether it has enough useful information for me to refer to at a future time. So far, I’ve bought three appliances, a CD and two books based on Epinions comments. I didn’t much care for the CD, but I bought it and that’s the whole purpose of the site. The appliances I bought had Epinions that were dead-on perfect. So:
Not Recommended - The author is typing gibberish, has plagiarized something (and I found proof), or has an incoherent writing style that doesn’t give me any information.
Somewhat Recommended - Usually, this person wrote on the topic, but really didn’t give me anything concrete upon which to base a recommendation. Epinion etiquette is that someone leaving an SR rating will typically leave a comment stating what he or she found lacking. It’s also considered polite to invite the author to email you the new URL if they decide to edit their posting based on comments such as yours.
Recommended - This is much like the “meets standards” rating you might see on a workplace review. This is not a bad rating. When I start reading an Epinion, my expectation is that I’m starting at “Recommended” and working up or down from there. If I have “Recommended” an Epinion, I found the posting to be articulate, useful now or for future research and a good summary of the basic pro and cons of the product or service.
Highly Recommended - You have not only done everything in the Recommended category, but you have been more thorough, entertained me, or just impressed me with your passion for the product and your writing. I’m not looking for length here, but I don’t know how you can completely cover a complex subject such as a car, software or an educational institution in 125 words. That may be okay for makeup or a golf ball, but I expect the HR opinion to be thorough.
MPR, MPO, Featured Reviewers and The Like
The first two are acronyms for “Most Popular Reviewers” and “Most Popular Opinions”. These are the nominal counts of authors and postings that have garnered the highest number of reads or people trusting them. Mobiprof and lap0530 have written the definitive series; oh let’s call them exposes, on the logistics of the Most Popular Opinions rankings. Suffice it to say, there are a number of holes in the process and these two enterprising stats wizards have found many of them. The URL to their series is at the end of this piece.
The most popular reviewers generally have earned their status through the reading, rating, writing cycle for a long time, but I’ll clue you in on two bits of jargon used to describe the less scrupulous:
Rubberstampers - These are folks who put an HR rating on everything that is posted to the system regardless of content. They’ll take a huge post like this and rate it HR within 30 seconds – faster than they could have possibly read the piece. Rubberstampers deserve your contempt.
Trust sluts - This group trusts everyone they encounter in an “I’ll do you, you do me” manner. The best way to find a trustslut is by finding someone new on your WOT who hasn’t read your work (or maybe only read one piece) and one who trusts 10 or 20 times the number of people who trust them. Let’s face it, if someone hasn’t read your work and they trust 100 people, but only 7 trust them, something’s not kosher.
Featured Reviewers are an entirely different category. They are frequently, although not necessarily, Advisors whom the Epinions staff believes are deserving of site-wide attention. At least, that’s my interpretation because the FAQs don’t really address the issue at all.
How Do You Find Out Stuff Like That?
I make it up.
Seriously, there are a number of boards that are not affiliated with Epinions catering to the site’s users. Among the most popular are Epinions Addicts and Epinions Astounded. There are also various email groups and user clubs on Yahoo! I’ve just listed the two I use, and frankly, keeping up with the volume there and here on Epinions, can be a time-consuming hobby. But if you’re in for the long haul, these are both excellent places to start. And no, I’m not going to compare them – you can go to each and make up your mind.
Speaking of volume, we all know that Epinions offers a notification service when a writer you like has posted a new piece. There’s another one out there, again not affiliated with Epinions, which I strongly urge you to check out. The site is run by Peter Tiemann (user ptiemann). Again, the URL is at the end of this piece. Peter’s site is so easy to use and organized so well that I don’t even use the Epinions notification service anymore.
Summing Up
This site is so robust, so complex and has such a large community that a single post simply can’t cover everything. My hope in writing this today is to provide a single spot for newcomers to find a lot of information. Things are never static around here, however, so I may revisit this topic in the future. Meanwhile, hopefully I’ve given someone a jump start in understanding what makes this a special place on the web.
I’ve deliberately stayed away from royalties, partner sites, profile pages, reading circles and income share. Trying to cover them here would not only make this an excruciatingly long post, but also cloud the issue. These are the basics one needs to get started. At some future time, maybe I’ll try to consolidate those in a more advanced post. Meanwhile, time’s a-wasting. As you read this, a number of posts hit the “Just In” box. Get busy reading!
And now on to the next 50 posts…
Links You Might Find Helpful
(in order of mention)
The Infamous Wired Article
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/egoboo.html
Mobiprof and Lap0530’s Profiles in Popularity
http://www15.brinkster.com/mobiprof/pip.html
Mobiprof and Lap0530’s List of The True MPOs
http://www15.brinkster.com/mobiprof/tmpo.html
EpinionAddicts.com
http://www.epinionaddicts.com
Epinions.Astounded.com
http://epinions.astounded.com/
Ptiemman’s Notification Site
http://www.preview.org/cgi-bin/notify.pl
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