After the general social networking sites, social reviewing or rating services are probably the most well-known source of online community action. Through these sites, individual users post reviews and rate their favorite bars, restaurants, stores, news items, books, movies....and libraries. People who need to find that kind of item or service can go to the community, search for what they need, read reviews, and then make a more informed choice. Once they've used the thing or the service, they can go back and add their review to the listing.
The number of social reviewing sites grows daily, but here's a few to get you going:
Media of all sorts: Amazon
News items: Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon
Food, Entertainment & Other Services: Yelp and Chowhound
Travel: TripAdvisor
Clothing: Many online stores now include customer review sections. Zappos (shoes) is a great example.
Contractors & Home Services: Angie's List -- a paid membership service that provides reviews of contractors. Take the Quick Tour to see how it works.
Discovery Activity:
Simple -- choose a site from above, find something to rate, and submit a rating. Write about using the tool in your blog and include a link to your review. Better still, find a different rating site or store and share the discovery with us through your blog.
You'll find more detailed instructions on how to do this here.
Go the Extra Mile:
Look up your library or institution in Yelp. If it's not there, make an entry for it. You'll need to post an initial 'review' to get it going, but don't pretend to be a patron and give your library four stars. Be you and be honest about who you are and what your library has to offer.
If you'd prefer to review something else, try and do the same for your favorite local restaurant or entertainment venue.
Next up, Thing 6: It's Classified!
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6 comments:
Dear Jennifer,
I am again pleased with the kismet. I just bought a pair of clogs from Zappo's, so went directly there to write a review. I had downloaded Skype earlier in the day (am I getting ahead again?) just as an exercise and low and behold Zappo's was connected, as are nearly everyone on Yelp (wrote a review for VHPL,)I am tenuous when it comes to using Skype, particularly in the quite library, also I am having difficulty downloading Atom. I'll write about that later. Cecily aka Beatrice
KGLibrarian said: "Hi Jennifer
I loved the Chow.com site. As I said I am running into some blocking problems at work and have not been able to access many items. But I have used Trip Advisor everytime I go away to check out the various hotels that we are going to visit before I make reservations and things to do."
Blogger, in its flakiness, deleted more than I told it to. My apologies, KG.
Hi Jennifer.
I just noticed that I was supposed to choose one of the sites you listed to write a review for. I hope you will still count the new site I introduced and the post I wrote there.
Cheers.
Hi, MsRead... Absolutely. Introducing a new site of the type we look at in any Thing is perfectly fine. My wording was meant for folks who were coming to this for the first time; I didn't mean to restrict anyone's choices. You're all set for Thing 5. No worries.
Hello Jennifer,
Just letting you know that I will have the link to my review posted to my blog as soon as it's up on the site.
Until then I wanted to move ahead while I had some time.
Thanks!
Stacy
I recently took a trip to Cuddles & Bubbles in Hyannis and decided that adding a review would be perfect for this course. Unfortunately I have to wait until the site administrator approves my comments.
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