Epinions, the addiction and how it could be better. By Me.
Jun 04 '00
I joined Epinions in early February and I lurked for a while. It is an addicting site to say the least. I used to go to Deja.com and cnet.com to read about potential purchases, and to just find out general information about a product or category of products. The quality of those sites was fair, the comments were generally short and not very informative, a good post was the exception. But they were not paying you, so there was no incentive to spend too much time writing a great opinion. Still, I liked hearing about regular people using a product and what they thought about it, reading those opinions along with “professional” reviews at ZDNet and CNET gave me a pretty good idea about a particular product.
Epinions is really the best of both of these worlds. You get the opinions of regular people, and I mean ‘regular’ in the best possible way. I mean, that is me, just a normal user of a product. People at magazines may be able to put a product in the context of others it is testing against, but I will not be using a product in a lab. At Epinions, you get many extremely well written, informative pieces about everything under the sun. I find myself getting lost browsing this site.
After lurking for about a month, I decided to write my first Epinion. I decided to write about my Palm Pilot since most people out there still have no idea what those little things can do, how useful they really are. They are not an organizer any more than a PC is a word processor. Anyway, I am getting off on a rant here but I do that about the Palm Pilot. God help the person who asks me what I am doing when I am using one, they get the 10-minute demonstration/evangelization by me. Most people are pretty impressed with what the Palm Pilot can do, I’ve actually sold people on them, and they’ve become converts. I decided to write my first Epinion on the Palm since I’d already written it a hundred times before to all those people whom I’ve cornered and preached to.
It was an enjoyable experience to write that review and I followed up with a couple more. Things I wanted to get the word out about, things I believed in. Those are the things that are easy to write about, the things that I have something to say about. I’ve always liked writing, but I had the problem of what to write about. Write about things that you like or dislike, write about things that you know. That is what Epinions is all about, writing what you know and sharing that with other people.
I had a few Opinions under my belt and they had earned me about one dollar. I realized that I wasn’t going to get rich doing this, but it was enjoyable and hopefully I would be able to contribute something good or at least something that would be useful to someone.
One day I logged on and saw that I had a balance of over seven dollars. Hmmm, did two hundred people just start reading my opinions? No, they had distributed income shares and I got six-plus dollars placed in my account. Wow, this could actually be something that you could make money at, maybe not get rich, but maybe I could make enough to buy some flash memory or a portable MP3 player. Something a little extra doing something I liked.
There are a couple of thought I have on the whole Epinions thing. There are a lot of people who write short opinions that have obvious misspellings and are just plain not well done. I know everyone makes mistakes and a large vocabulary is something that not everyone can have (myself included), but I get discouraged when I read an opinion that is a mess. That it obviously was not proofread even once. It was just thrown together to build stats; I do not like ‘stat epinions’. I get even more discouraged when I see these types of reviews recommended or highly recommended. I would think that with such a large sampling of people rating these things, that we would have an efficient system. That, over time, the reviews that are best will get the best ratings. But at this point, I don’t see it that way; there are far too many poor reviews that are rated highly and too many great, unknown writers out there. I hope, that over time, we will see an efficient system coming together and that the cream will rise to the top.
Another thought I’ve had: I’ve read it written here that people should find things that have not been reviewed or have been reviewed only a few times and write about that. ‘Who needs opinion number 1034 on Star Wars?’ goes the question. Well, I disagree with that, I think people should write about what they like, what they are passionate about. If you happen to write about something that a lot of people have not yet discovered, great, get the word out. Sing it loud and sing it long. Let people know about it, and do your best. If you happen to love Star Wars, even though it has been written about more than a thousand times, I say write about it. Your voice means something too, if you love it, say it. Write about what you feel something for. Who cares if it has already been written one time or a thousand times?
I would also like to see a wider scale that can be used to rate reviews. I think that the four choices that we currently have are not adequate. I would like to see a scale from one to ten; this would allow the better-reviewed opinions to be separated from ones that may not be so well reviewed. With the popularity this site is gaining, I don’t think four choices is enough.
Finally, I wish that the site itself could work better more often. This is far and away the buggiest site I have been involved with. I had one review that had a member view count of two, but seven people had recommended it. Do the math. It stayed this way for weeks and customer support gave me the standard ‘there is a problem that we are aware of and are looking into it’ answer. I don’t think there has been one day that this site has been up and running perfectly. I hope that, in the future these quirks get worked out.
I do love this web site; it is one of the most addicting ones I’ve come across. The more I’ve written, the more I’ve liked what I’m doing. The money has really become secondary to trying to put together something that people would want to read, something to be proud of. I hope I am able to do that.
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Epinions.com ID:
dmcostello
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Reviews written: 65
Trusted by: 26 members
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