local

Continuing with my posts on the thoughts and concerns I have about Lopico, today’s post concerns the structure of reviews.

One of the biggest issues with any local review site is the content of the reviews. There are many issues involved, including among others: accountability, bias, saturation, and the reaction of reviewed businesses. Reviews on Lopico currently attempt to find balance through structure. When you review a business on Lopico, you’re asked to input both “what you like” and “what you would change” about the business. Lopico has always focused on the positive, as it is intended to be a directory of only favorite businesses, but the “what you would change” input also provides an outlet for constructive feedback to the businesses listed on Lopico. That’s the plan anyway. Things don’t always work out that way.

To this point my answer to the issues surrounding user reviews has always been providing structure, but that too has problems. I’ve been experimenting outside Lopico with a more free form method of writing reviews with my own Tumblr microblog. Truthfully, I like this method of reviewing better. I like that I can write as many reviews as I want about a business and I like that I dictate the structure. The challenge (and I think I have the solution) for Lopico is finding a happy medium.

I know I have some smart readers, even though comments have been slim lately, so tell me something you think about user generated local reviews and the best ways to tackle the problems

I may be giving up Lopico. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it’s time for another project (or two). I’ve had a lot of fun with Lopico and learned a lot - it has been an incredibly valuable experience - I just don’t know that my heart is still in it. This current month has been the worst since Lopico relaunched, and I’m apathetic. Things were going well for a while - for a long time - but I don’t know, I think it’s nearing the end. The local niche / vertical just doesn’t do it for me anymore. There are so many other ideas I’d like to try out and other things I’d like to do… I think some time away from Lopico will do me good. I’m not going to close the site, I don’t even know that I won’t finish the redesign - I’m just saying I need to try some other projects.

NEO2.0 is my newest project - I think it has potential, but needs a LOT of work. For NEO2.0 to really work I need to have more time for it, and I only have so much time to work on my own projects. Cutting back time from Lopico will help. I also registered a new domain for another new site today that I think has a lot of potential. It’s focused on something that interests me more right now than the local vertical.

So… what do you think?

I had an informal meeting last week with my good friend Jeff, who has an e-commerce website. He reads this blog and during the meeting we talked about one of the posts - this one in which I ramble on about my possible future. Anyway, while we were talking about it I mentioned Brewed Fresh Daily, Knotice, Sage Rock, and probably some other bloggers / people / companies that he hadn’t heard of that are based in Northeast Ohio. I thought about doing a post about these bloggers / people / companies, but then I thought it’s probably better as a stand alone, not a post that will disappear from the homepage in a week or so. So… I’d like to introduce NEO2.0.

NEO2.0 is a wiki to help promote all of the great things happening in Northeast Ohio. I feel that the people that are working hard to push our community forward don’t get enough recognition - especially in the early stages of their projects - I’m hoping this wiki can help a little in that regard. (The password is ohio.)

For now I’m just using a free hosted wiki (from pbwiki which I highly recommend) - but if it gains a little traction I’ll consider hosting it or doing something other than a wiki. Ideally, I’d create a social network for the type of people interested in this site that allows the people that I’m trying to promote to connect, exchange ideas, and maybe plan some interesting events. We’ll see - that’s a long way from where this is right now.

Try it out and please add as much stuff as you’d like. Remember the password is ohio.

Judy’s Book founder Andy Sack, is doing what bloggers should do. His blog has been great lately, it’s open, it’s honest, it’s self critical, and above all it’s really interesting. If you have a corporate blog, or you want to become a corporate blogger take a look at his blog. The problem is you probably won’t want to / be allowed to take the risks he does, but if you want your blog to work he’s giving free lessons.
http://asack.typepad.com/a_sack_of_seattle/

Smalltown.com launched the other day, and I’ll call it Yalp! Yalp, is an acronym for “yet another local player” - but unlike some of the good local players I don’t really like what Smalltown is doing.

To me it just doesn’t make sense. Smalltown is built in Flash and can be an intense page load. Yet it’s targeted at small towns. Sure small towns are coming around to this whole broadband thing, but in general people in small towns spend less time online and are more likely to have dial-up connections. Furthermore, flash is a tricky issue for search engines. Smalltown seems to have some of that figured out, but with such a heavy amount of local traffic coming from search I don’t think it makes sense to risk the search optimization.

My website wednesdays can only get one of two grades either “this will change how I use the web” or “fail”

Grade: Fail.

What better to do on a friday than make RSS feeds. Today I added RSS to motask and Lopico.

Motask’s RSS is limted because of privacy regarding to-do lists, you can only get the feed to work properly as a live bookmark. Perhaps more importantly, I also added RSS to Lopico Reviews. I did this to make it easier for businesses owners to find out when their business has been reviewed.

Found via Screenwerk.

The New York Times ran an article yesterday on local search. It’s interesting to me because of what it says is missing from local search: quantity. Not quantity in the number of competitors, but quantity in the number of reviews. The thinking is that it takes a large number of reviews to generate a trustworthy opinion. I would have to agree and disagree with that. Even if there are a large number of reviews, what are the chances that these reviews represent the average opinion of a customer of these businesses? I’ve accounted for that exact problem in two ways on Lopico.

First, reviews are not the core of the site. The core of the site is the listings and the votes. Before a business is even listed, someone has to take the effort to add it to the site; essentially giving the first endorsement that this is a quality business. Then the businesses are voted for, this is what really separates Lopico. It is very easy to see with one look what the best places in a city are (really only in Akron right now and a little in the other popular cities), at least much easier than other sites make it. To me reviews are an after thought, not the focus. If you want more info, check the reviews, but if you just want the mass of opinions, you don’t have to read anything. Voting is a lot easier to do than writing a review and also a lot easier for the information seeker to decipher.

Secondly, I’ve accepted the fact that reviews are going to be either really strong for or against, and have created a review system that requires a reviewer to think about both sides. I’m gong to do even more in the future in terms of user ratings but for now, the combination of votes, user experience ranking and balanced reviews is working just fine.

The Lopico account system just launched, so I don’t have a large enough user base yet (anymore?) to really compete on mass, but as it grows I believe Lopico will emerge as one of the most, if not the most, valuable resource for finding local businesses. I’ll add to that, that since Lopico relaunched on the 24th (almost two weeks ago), the site has not yet been fully reindexed on all Search Engines, in fact only about 6 cities (3%) are indexed right now (and only on Google), yet I’ve ranked first for almost 700 keywords or phrases, and close enough to the top to generate clicks on even more queries. And, these aren’t just one page view clicks, the average number of page views is around 5, with the top ranking query producing over 200 page views. That may not seem like that much, but without being indexed, search really isn’t that big of a factor right now. I’m not as bold as Barry Diller, but I think that’s a decent start.

If you ask someone to reccomend a restaurant or a bar or a mechanic, most likely they won’t waste your time giving you the names of every possible place in your city. Instead they’ll tell you the best, they’ll direct you to where you’re going to have the best experience.

If you asked 100 people for the best place to go, you’ll most likely come out with one clear winner, and that answer will probably be better than the answer given to you by the one person in the first example.

Every city has 100s of businesses that no one would mention, they wouldn’t want to waste your time. That’s how I feel things would work in real life, so that’s how things work on Lopico. Lopico is never going to be a directory of every business in the united states or the world, it’s only going to be a directory of the ones that are worth your time - at least as long as I own it.