great tips and thanks! I think you’re right about localizing it.

I have a plan to deal with this where basically people will be able to turn on a sitewide “filter” to only show things in a certain geographic area. StackOverflow does this similar filtering (not for geographic areas though).

After doing one site with geographic subdomains like CragsList, I’m not eager to repeat the experience :) It was annoying to manage.

But I think your main point is spot on – thanks for the kind words and talk soon!

Oh yeah, and you’re right about the chicken-egg thing too. I’ve been thinking about trying to partner with someone who has a big list to send to (Tim Ferriss?) which might help.

This idea is great, no doubt, and I have worked on something similar in the past (which actually morphed into something cool of its own). However, the one thing I’ve always dreaded was the chicken-n-egg of “you need tons of reviews to be useful, but you can’t have tons of reviews without tons of users”.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that this seeding process will be far, far easier if you limit your reviews to geographic regions (and an online ‘region’).

In other words, I don’t really give a rat’s ass about Neil’s guitar shop in Australia (no offense Neil), as I live in LA. Think about how craigslist started — it would have never worked had it been a nationwide catch-all for all advertisements.

Some things are just meant to be localized. Another good example is Yelp, and on that note I think calling yourself a cross between Yelp (or epinions in its heyday) and Wikipedia is simpler than the trio you’ve chosen. Who reads consumer reports these days, anyway ? ;)

Stay focused.

When one goes into categories and clicks on one, you only see the the description. I was looking for the review I had written and after about ten seconds I worked out that I had to click on the title of the review to read the actual review.

Perhaps add “Description” title and a “Click here to read reviews” link.

Cheers.

You have seemed to have got on top of those bugs. I signed up smoothly, created a new page and then wrote a review for Coca Cola Zero and voted for it all on the first go. It passed the Gordie simplicity test.

If I can use your site, anybody can.

http://ui-patterns.com/collection/rate-content

What do ya’ll think?

I’ll have to look into that after I fix the voting system.