Sunday, February 24, 2013

The RUR System - a proposed method for Really Useful Reviews

Background

I've been on the internet for almost 18 years now, and I've seen plenty of reviews all over the web, especially. And, in general, it's difficult to trust just anyone else's review, whether for a physical product, an app, a movie, a book, and so on. Sure, there are good, useful reviews out there, which only suggests that certainly there is a proper way to make a review. In general, it should be as objective as possible, and has less subjectivity as much as possible. In many cases, the review is too subjective, it becomes not-so-useful if you have a very different background from the reviewer, or you would totally appreciate the review because you are under similar circumstances as the reviewer. In some cases though, this attracts some much-unneeded internet hate, for example if a known Apple-loving journalist suddenly reviews a non-Apple product. Pageview-driven websites and egotistic website/blog owners like make these kinds of reviews, of course, for the ad revenues or just for bragging rights. But for the rest of us, the bottomline is the most important thing. Is it useful for us? Is it worth our $$$ or at least our time? In this article, I first review current review/rating methods. And finally, I will be proposing a new review method/system that maybe reviewers can use, that would ultimately benefit the readers (or viewers) of those reviews.