In my previous post on online reviews I had said that most people go out and write a review of a product or service only if their experience is superbly cool or awfully bad. Since in reality such people are obviously smaller in number than the total number of consumers of a product or service, you cannot take the user ratings at their face value and calculate the overall rating. There was some interesting discussion in the comments to that post. I guess the bottom line is just that it has to be really easy for people to rate products and services. I think a system that munges the data in blogs, recognizes a review when it sees one, slices and dices different reviews of the same product or service in an interesting manner would be the one that would solve this problem. OK, enter Microformats.
Microformats allow you to attach a meaning to your HTML using specific attributes. hReview is the microformat that allows for embedding reviews in webpages and for machines to recognize a review when they encounter one. You can read about microformats at www.microformats.org.
abhas1
May 20, 2006
wait, I got nothing to say but OHMYGOD! this template does a lot more than just rock, it bloody rocks…I gotta shift to wordPress…
Siddharth
May 23, 2006
Yes, but again, only a small percentage of the people using the product will write rewievs on their webpages, and a small percentage of them will use microformats, so it really is back to square one.
And then, all reviews are taken on sample populations, so in my judgement, online reviews are better than no reviews at all, though I would give the review more weightage depending on the total no. of participants.
Sid
May 24, 2006
You are right – so how about blogging clients that let you write a review on your weblog using hReview, events using hCalendar, etc.?
Siddharth
May 26, 2006
In the end, really, what are reviews?? Its just a personal opinion. And they are bound to differ from person to person.
So I think there is really no perfect reviewing system, but whechever one can gain the most user acceptability, will be the one that works best. For example, if google launches such a system tomorrow, it will most probably leave most others behind, even though it might not be better, but it will collect most reviews.
abhas1
May 27, 2006
Forget the reviews.
Ask the ninja.
wealthbuildertip
June 8, 2006
Online Reviews is only a great way for someone to sell a Product!! Closest to a true review system is via Forums or Blogs about the product. But it that takes time to do the research especially when its not something common. Marketers knows this that is why they have celeberties to endorse products because they know majority of us have a tendency to trust them moren
Arshad Tanveer
June 8, 2006
Sid,
So you haven’t forgotten the word “munge”, eh? Here is a link to its entire meaning http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/munge.html.
-Tanveer
Sid
June 8, 2006
Oh no, I haven’t
Laks
June 21, 2006
Sid. Long time man… microformats sounds pretty cool and useful too.
scdoshi
July 5, 2006
Hey, where’d you go?