Organizing the Opinions
Posted by hyperpat on November 16, 2006
For those readers into book reviews, I’ve added a RSS feed to my reviews at Amazon in the right hand side bar. This is something new that Amazon has just implemented, and I expect there may be some glitches in this for a little while (Amazon is not known for having glitch-free software rollouts). What displays here are the links to my latest 10 reviews. If you really want to see all of them (253 as of today), go to My Reviews (you can also get there by clicking on any of the review links here, then clicking on the link beside my picture that says “see all xxx reviews”). With this link available, though, I won’t be posting any more of my reviews here, though I still may have comments about various books as they relate to something else I’m talking about.
Reviewing is something I’ve been doing for quite some time. Even before Amazon existed, I was merrily telling my friends on various message boards what I thought of various works. So when Amazon came along and became established enough to look like it wouldn’t fold in the next week, I latched onto it as a good place to put these opinions out before a much wider audience. Writing for this format was a bit different, much more formal and detailed, and some of my very early reviews on Amazon weren’t very well done (there’s a learning curve to everything!). I do get a nice ego-boost out of Amazon’s system for ranking reviewers – at one point I was listed at #410 (out of 2 million reviewers) on the US site, and am still listed at #24 on the British version of Amazon (unfortunately, the UK site has some severe adminstrative problems in handling reviews, and I haven’t submitted anything new over there in quite some time, hoping they’ll finally fix their problems). Reaching revewer ranks higher than this, though, calls for more work than I have time for, but if you do so happen to read some of these reviews, and find they helped you make a decision about purchasing/reading the item, please vote! That will at least keep me somewhere in the 500’s.
I’ve also put a few reviews up on Epinions (I didn’t do so in the early days because back then they had an exclusivity clause in their contract), expanded versions of those on Amazon. But I find it too much work to write at the length and detail that Epinions seems to like, so I’ve pretty much stayed with the Amazon format.
Happy reading, and I hope my reviews will direct you to something you really enjoy.
Hyperpat\'s HyperDay 
fencer said
I’ve enjoyed your reviews… now just to find time to do some reading of some of your recommendations.
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