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No more Mr. Nice guy.... (and why)Jul 14 '00 Write an essay on this topic.In the past, I have been somewhat lackadaisical about how I rate reviews. I am now not nearly as generous with my ratings. I think that for epinions to be a truly successful web site for the long haul, we must be more diligent about how we hand out ratings. In the past, I have given out HR ratings to any review that I thought had useful information in it. If I felt that I learned something, I wanted to reward the author for passing along their knowledge and experience. A lot of people write reviews on epinions to make money. (I like making money) That money however, must come from somewhere. Advertisers should be willing to provide a strong income stream to epinions (and those of us who write here) if we are able to attract shoppers to our site. If I had a product to sell, I would be very willing to pay a substantial fee to get my ad in front of a shopper who is reading reviews on products of myself or my competitor. Unfortunately, I would not be interested in paying to have my ad in front of people who are reading reviews because their friends wrote them, or because they like reading reviews. With that in mind, the epinions community should focus its efforts toward attracting external (non-member) traffic. I feel that the best way to do that is to have our content be as comprehensive as possible. The main weakness of Internet research is the vast quantity of information out there. If you are looking for an answer to a question, it seems that you often have to sift through pages and pages of garbage to find the answer that you are looking for. Websites that consistently are the place where you can finally stop digging are going to be the ones that users rely on and visit first. The non-member is certainly going to be turned off when they read the top four reviews, and have to push that ugly “show all 101 reviews” link at the bottom. “Here we go again, even more digging to do… sigh….” I know that the reviews that I rate “highly recommended” are going to place higher on the list of reviews for people who trust me. I want the reviews that are most likely to answer the shopper’s questions to appear at the top of the category. This way the user won’t have to keep digging for better information. As a percentage, I think that the quantity of comprehensive reviews on epinions is fairly low. It seems like most writers have a “gee, what should I review today?” kind of attitude. Some of mine included. A lot of reviews that I now rate R do have useful information in them. It is just that anecdotes and useful information about a certain facet of a product is not the kind of content that is going to keep the non-member coming back to Epinions every time that they want to buy something. I plan to rate according to the following criteria from now on. HR: I am interested in learning about this product, and the review gave me an excellent overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the product. R: I learned something interesting or unusual about the product that I am interested, but I still have several questions that you did not address. SR: Thanks for trying, but I didn’t learn anything new from your review. (Maybe somebody could benefit from reading it.) Please do a little more research, or put a little more effort in next time. NR: You are just writing this review to be obnoxious, to cheat, or to slander somebody’s product. Your review makes epinions look bad. If you agree with my analysis, I would encourage people to consider rating in a similar manner. It is also a good idea to trust people that are responsible raters. It also makes your epinions browsing a lot more interesting. You will not have so many mediocre reviews to dig though before you have a pretty good feel for a product.  |
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