Review tools

06 August, 2004

I’m a big fan of Alf Eaton’s forays into review tools, and his new RVW! bookmarklet is ace.

From any item page on amazon you click the bookmarklet and get to add a rating, a heading and a review and can add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks. See Alf’s del.icio.us bookmarks for an example.

Using an existing system like del.icio.us has its advantages (like, it’s already there) but there are also obvious problems:

because it creates a new tag per item based on the ASIN your tag list will soon grow to be immense
the “rating:x%” tags aren’t usable because they don’t create valid del.icio.us URLS, so their usefulness becomes moot
The “year” tags (like 1977 for Young, Loud and Snotty) don’t work for some unknown reason

I think the combo of a huge tag list and the partial loss of ratings (since you could still get all of the ratings for a particular item and aggregate them) to get someone’s favourite items is what kills it for me. What’s needed is a centralised system to post things like this. A pure reviews site that accepts REST and XML-RPC and everything and just works, where you can create reviews, and store them, and retrieve them, provide all the info with RDF and get personal recommendations.

How hard can it be? 😉

See other posts tagged with general and all posts made in August 2004.

Comments

Anonymous

06 August, 2004 at 12:04

The problem with multiple urn:asin tags is real, but hopefully there’ll be a way of collapsing them in your tag list soon. A tag for each individual item is necessary though, so that you can see who else bookmarked the same item (you could use the Amazon URL for this I suppose, but that would split up bookmarks that point to different countries).

I switched from a plain n% to rating:80% today, to avoid conflict with a possible ‘currently reading’ list where you might want to indicate how far through the book you are. It’s debatable whether that’s necessary, but I’m not getting your problem with invalid delicious URLs anyway – maybe you’re not escaping the percent sign, eg http://del.icio.us/hublicious/rating:80%25

The year tags don’t work for individual users as they conflict with the numbers used for ‘earlier and ‘later’ pages. You can get around this by putting a ‘+’ in front of the number, eg http://del.icio.us/hublicious/+2004 . The year tags work fine globally however, eg http://del.icio.us/tag/2004

You’re right about the pure reviews server though. Want to help get it started?

Anonymous

06 August, 2004 at 12:06

^ That was Alf, by the way ^

Pip

06 August, 2004 at 12:31

Of course you’re completely right, it’s choking on the unescaped %, I don’t know why, but I thought it was failing on the colon. Possibly because I’m a fool. 🙂

Still, it’s a shame it doesn’t auto-escape the % for you.

Of course, it conflicts with the delicious date system. It’s been so long since I used that I’d forgotten it existed. Good hint about using + before the number to see it. The global tag is slightly less useful of course because you really want just reviews for the year and I don’t think you can join tags globally can you?