news & views from RateItAll

Add RateItAll to Your Site by Copying and Pasting

2009-06-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

We just launched a new feature that we hope will make adding RateItAll to other sites as easy as copying and pasting.

We're calling this thing the RateItAll Review Widget.

Here's how it works. On every item page on RateItAll (e.g. iPod (widget), Pixar's Up (widget), Abraham Lincoln (widget), Red Bull (widget)), you will now see a little embed icon that looks like this:

Clicking that icon lets you format a little module (widget) that can be pasted onto your blog or website. Don't be fooled by the small size of the widget - you can post reviews into this thing, and you can also read the reviews of others. You can login via your RateItAll or account, or via your Facebook account. It's like a little mini RateItAll to go.

So what are the implications of this? If you are Randyman and write an awesome blog about boxing, you can include reviews of some of the great fights in history on your blog. Or if politics is your thing, you can include reviews of any US President, or any issue from RateItAll controversial list of political issues.

Anyone who has spent time on RateItAll knows we have something for everyone. There are now more than 2.2M little review widgets for your copying and pasting pleasure. Message me with questions.

Here's a widget for Disputed Iranian Election.

Disputed Iranian ElectionEvents of 2009

(Note: if you were using the old widget, replace the old code with the new - it's way better)

Are you on Twitter? Follow RIA's accounts

2009-06-01T14:54:00.000-07:00

Here are some fun Twitter accounts to follow for RIA addicts:

/AllReviews - this account gives you a real time feed (with links) of everything getting rated on the RIA network

/AllComments - this account gives you a real time feed of all new comments

/AllItems - This account gives you a real time feed of all new items added to RIA (minus LongTail)

/AllQuiz - real time feed of all quizzes taken

/RateItAll - Editorially selected pages from RateItAll

One More Big Fix Live

2009-06-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

Since the launch of V3, one of the biggest complaints we've heard from folks who use the site a lot was in regards to the Home / River page.

Here was the problem:

If you paged down a few pages to see recent reviews on the home page, then clicked off on something, and then clicked back on the browser - the page was not remembering that you had paged down. In order to get back to the view you were on, you had to page down again.

This was annoying for a lot of folks.

This is now fixed - please try it out.

Host Maintenance

2009-05-30T13:03:00.001-07:00

Our host is doing some maintenance today and site availability has been sporadic.

I will post an update when I have it.

Best of May

2009-05-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of stats from the month of May:

Top Three Helpful Vote Getters:

Irishgit
edt4
FranksWildYears

Newcomers of Note (follow these folks!)

Gris
Ayn
SK4U2009
quarterhorse51
kat15lee
cinnleigh
darkpalace
irishprincess3279

Most Visited Review / Comments Page:

Torture Should Never be Used (review by Ridgewalker)

Most Visited Member List:

90's Music (jamie mcbain)
(more than 22K people visited the landing page for this, and many more hit item pages on it)

Perfect Review Sharing

2009-05-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last few weeks working very hard on improving the sharing functionality associated with various parts of RateItAll - specifically, Lists, Items, and Reviews.

We've focused our efforts on three ways to share in particular:

- Email
- Facebook
- Twitter

If you look at the top of the right hand column of any List, Item, or Review page, you will now see a "Share This Page" module:

First, let's look at the email sharing option.

Let's say I wanted to share my awesome list of Mexican Beer (which I am very proud of) with my friends via email.

Clicking the envelope icon on my Mexican Beer page pops open the following form:

With this form, I am able to type in email addresses one by one, and include a brief note.

I can also pull in contacts from my address books on services like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail by clicking the "Use Your Address Book Instead" button:

This tool lets you select friends from your address book to receive an email with a link pointing to your list (or item, or review).

Now let's look at Facebook. By now, just about everyone has a Facebook account, and Facebook's newsfeed format is a perfect way to share your lists, reviews, or items with your Facebook friends.

Clicking the Facebook Icon (farthest one on the right), will do one of two things depending on if you are logged into Facebook at that moment:

If you are logged into Facebook, you will see a prompt from Facebook that looks like this:

If you are not logged into Facebook, you will be prompted to login to your Facebook account before seeing the posting prompt above:

When you share a RateItAll story on Facebook, your Facebook profile will look like this:

And when my Facebook friends share RateItAll stories, this is what I see on my Facebook home page:

Now let's talk about Twitter. I know that folks on RIA are a bit skeptical, but this service is taking off like a rocket right now.

Clicking on the light blue "T" icon:

Will automatically open up a new browser window that includes a link to the page (list, item, or review), as well as some text that indicates whether it's a list, item, or review that you are sharing. Here is what it looks like - note that the posting field is pre-populated with the link and text, all you have to do is click "update":

One thing to note - you can share any list, item, or review page to Facebook, Twitter, or Email, whether or not you created the page, and whether or not you are even logged in to RateItAll.

These sharing features are available to everyone, and we hope they will be a great way to get more exposure for your reviews and lists.

Please poke around and let us know what you think.

We just pushed a couple of improvements live

2009-05-26T17:03:00.001-07:00

We just made a couple of enhancements to the site:

- We added perfect sharing tools on every List, Item, and Review page. You can now push out any of these pages with one click to Facebook, Twitter, or Email, whether you are logged in or not. This will be a full post shortly.

- The home page river now remembers what view you were on if you click away, so that if you click back, you don't have to reconfigure your view. For example, let's say you are on your home river / feed page, and have used the filters to isolate just comments. If you click away from your home page, and then click "back" on your browser, you will see the same view that you left - just the comments. The only view state we are not remembering yet is the paging - this will be added soon. Sounds minor, but this is a big improvement.

- We have created a short form URL of all of our item and topic pages that can be more easily shared. Here's an example of the long form URL:

http://www.rateitall.com/i-839549-should-never-be-used.aspx

And here's the short one:

http://rateitall.com/i-839549

- We have fixed some annoying formatting issues when publishing reviews to Facebook - things like apostrophes and quotations should work fine now.

Congratulations to our Book Review Contest Winners

2009-05-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

There are a couple of folks on the site who have realized that by focusing their efforts on a particular category for a day, they can walk home with some serious loot.

Congratulations to:

1) Irishgit
2) Twansalem
3) CinnLeigh

A close honorable mention goes to edt4.

In this particular contest, it took 42 qualifying book reviews to walk home with a $100 Amazon gift certificate. For some of you folks with 2K, 4K, 10K reviews... it would have been child's play to finish in the money.

Don't get me wrong - We are happy to keep shipping gift certificates and loot to Twansalem and Irishgit - both are very strong writers, and write consistently helpful, amusing, and thoughtful posts. But it surprises me that more of you don't lay off the silly stuff and / or the politics for a day, and put your reviews to work.

Prize delivery will go out today, via email.

Congratulations to those who participated.

Dealing with some performance issues...

2009-05-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

.... we're on it. Stay tuned.

Sharing is Beautiful

2009-05-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

For the last few days, we've been working very hard on making RIA reviews more share-able. Some of our work is live on the site, and there will be some more tweaks coming.

Here's an interesting look at the 10 most shared reviews on RateItAll over the past 45 days:

Directv
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3849860.aspx

Tribe of Noise
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3901927.aspx

Canaca Web Hosting
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3921430.aspx

Keith Reid
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3925302.aspx

Camel Snus
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3887130.aspx

University of Phoenix
http://www.rateitall.com/r-3884516.aspx

Panasonic Lumix
http://www.rateitall.com/r-4154474.aspx

Jimmy Swaggart
http://www.rateitall.com/r-1343509.aspx

Wal-Mart Super Tech Oil
http://www.rateitall.com/r-2282764.aspx

Quick Update on Sharing Reviews on Facebook

2009-05-14T17:52:00.001-07:00

If you see a little FB icon in the header like this:

You are good to go, and can pick and choose reviews to push to Facebook.

If you DON'T see that little "F," you need to click the Facebook Logo in the right sidebar on the home page:

Can people please help us test this feature?

Try logging in with both Facebook and your regular RIA login.

Thanks.

Friday Book Review Contest - IT'S ON

2009-05-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

Do you like to read books? Do you read the occasional comic book? Did someone read to you as a small child?

Then you may be well positioned for our Friday Bookworm Smackdown.

You know the drill:

- Any review of a book or author qualifies as long as it's three sentences or more
- Contest runs from Midnight tonight, Thursday, to 11:59PM tomorrow, Friday
- Winners will be determined by number of qualifying reviews within the contest period

send an email to contest@rateitall.com with your RateItAll nickname to participate

Our book section is massively, grotesquely inflated - I bet you will be able to find anything that you might have read.

Prizes:

First: $100 Amazon Gift Certificate
Second: $50 Amazon Gift Certificate
Third: $25 Amazon Gift Certificate

Official contest rules

Contest starts at 12:00AM PT on Friday, May 15th and runs through 11:59PM PT on Friday, May 15th.
Participants must have valid RateItAll member accounts.
Contest participants must register for the contest by sending an email to contest@rateitall.com with their valid and active RateItAll nickname in order to be considered for the prizes.
Reviews must be of books or authors to be considered.
Each quality book review will count as one entry in the contest. Reviews must be at least three sentences.
Recycled or reposted reviews will not be considered for the contest, and use of such reviews will be grounds for disqualification.
Prizes are non-transferrable and are subject to change and availability.
RateItAll reserves the right to discontinue the contest at any time, for any reason. RateItAll reserves the right to disqualify participants if we determine that contest rules have been broken.
Questions about the contest? Email contest@rateitall.com
Winners will be notified on or by Monday, May 18th, 2009.
All decisions made by contest administrators are final.

Want to rate the local businesses in your neighborhood?

2009-05-12T15:37:00.001-07:00

Then shoot me a note. Tell me the town you live in and I will see if we can load up some local biz info for your home town.

We're here to help.

Merge Feature

2009-05-12T14:20:00.001-07:00

We now have an administrative merge feature that allows us to merge identical lists together, as well as identical items.

Because as we all know, duplication is such a drag.

If you're aware of any identical weblists, please let us know...

Share your RateItAll reviews with your Facebook friends

2009-05-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

For a while now, we've offered the ability for new members of RateItAll to sign up using their Facebook login. This allows these new members to pick and choose reviews that they write to share on Facebook with their Facebook friends.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to offer this functionality to existing RateItAll members, because we didn't have the ability to link an older RIA account with a Facebook account.

This is no longer the case.

We've just introduced the ability for anyone to link their RateItAll account to their Facebook account.

Why would you want to do this? Because it lets you easily share reviews with your Facebook friends, giving your reviews more visibility.

The key aspects of the program are as follows:

- it only takes one click to link your RateItAll and Facebook accounts

- you only share the reviews that you want to - each time you write a review, you are given the option of sharing it with your Facebook friends. If you don't want to, you don't have to - I probably only share about one out of ten reviews that I write.

- once you have linked your Facebook and RateItAll accounts, you will be able to login to RateItAll with one click

To link your RateItAll and Facebook accounts, click the Facebook icon on your home page:

Here's what the Facebook prompt looks like after you write a review:

Here's what a shared review looks like on a Facebook news feed:

I really hope that you will try this feature out. One of the fun things about RateItAll is the "instant feedback" aspect of the site. We write things, and people react to our opinions.

This new Facebook feature increases our collective reach to include our Facebook networks. Folks can even "like" and comment on your reviews right on Facebook.

Let me know if you have questions.

Book Review Contest - Postponed One Week

2009-05-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

For the last seven days, our friend and compatriot Automatt has wired himself to an energy drink IV and has been furiously adding books to RIA's database in preparation for the Great Book Review Contest.

He is now adding books, with full descriptions, at the rate of one every seven seconds. He is typing at approximately 4,321,654 words per minute, and hasn't slept since last Thursday.

Astromike, in assessing whether or not he would like to have a beer with Automatt, says it best:

As long as he doesnt bring his lap top to the bar and post list items on RIA all night it could be fun lol. Im sure he's an all right dude. (lol)

Sadly, even at this reckless pace, it looks like we're just not going to be ready for tomorrow.

I've asked Automatt to pick it up all a bit - we should be good to go for next Friday.

In the meantime, for you book readers out there, please start compiling a mental list of books to review. For those who don't read, you still have a week to get started.

More details to follow.

Some Definitions, aka The Most Boring Blog Post Ever

2009-05-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

I thought that people might enjoy a peek into the internal RIA HQ nomenclature that we use to describe things on the site.

(editor's note: this is boring)

Here it is:

Definitions:

Reviewer – Registered user

Rating – Value: 1-5

Review – Text associated with a rating

Comment – Response or reply to a review

Item – Something that can be rated (e.g. person, place, thing, Corona, etc.)

Topic – A grouping of items (e.g. Mexican Beer), otherwise known as a list or a weblist

Subject – A collection of topics (e.g. Drinks)

Book Review Contest on Friday

2009-05-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

We've done movies.

We've done music.

We've done local businesses.

This Friday will be books... more details to follow.

Speed

2009-04-30T19:16:00.001-07:00

The RateItAll dev team has been working very, very hard at making RIA fast.

And I think it's very fast now - as fast as it's been.

I hope you all are seeing the same thing.

You can now see item descriptions on the list pages

2009-04-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, inspired by the RIA movie review contest, I wrote a review of the Sandra Bullock coming of age, romantic comedy "28 Days." Among other things I said:

The empty London scenes were the best, and spastic, fluid spewing zombies are certainly more effective than the slow moving sort.

Some have suggested that I may be confusing the Sandra Bullock film with 28 Days Later, about a zombie outbreak in London. This is debatable, and neither here nor there.

What I would like to talk about today is a design tweak we just rolled out that lets you see item descriptions (text, photo, video, etc.) when rating from a list page. This feature might prevent people from getting confused about exactly what item they are rating while on the list page.

Check out this screenshot of my Flight of the Conchords video list.

If I click "Review It!" you will see that the first item on the list snaps down to display the description - in this case, a video.

I think rating from the list pages will be much easier now, especially for items that have images, descriptions, and / or videos.

Music Contest Prizes Just Went Out

2009-04-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to OscarGamblesFro, Irishgit, and Frankswildyears - Amazon gift certificate just went out.

Speaking on behalf of the entire RIA community, we expect to see reviews of whatever Amazon product you buy.

A couple of site updates

2009-04-24T09:59:00.001-07:00

Two days ago, we rolled in some optimizations to the home page / river that vastly sped the page up for most people.

However, we learned that folks who had subscribed to multiple keywords were seeing some timeouts - this was fixed last night, so now everyone should be seeing a faster home page while logged in. While logged out, we have the home page loading in under 0.2 seconds, which is as fast as its ever been.

Yesterday, we rolled in some optimizations to the list page - these pages should now be loading rocket fast for everyone. Even some of our notorious Crunchbase lists which have 17K items are loading pretty quickly.

Today, we're going to be taking on the item page - once we get done with that, I think we're going to have a pretty fast site.

Finally, we made some small tweaks to the AdSense revenue sharing code yesterday - please let us know if you see improvements in your daily AdSense numbers.

Congratulations to our Music Review Contest Winners

2009-04-21T09:57:00.000-07:00

Our top finishers in the music contest were:

1) Oscargamblesfro

2) IrishGit

3) FranksWildYears

Prizes will go out by the end of the week.

Now that Twansalem has a Netflix account, he can't be bothered to participate in our contests.

As has been the case with our previous two reviews contests, I found to the quality of the reviews to be very, very high.

Here is a taste:

Couple of Changes to the List Page

2009-04-20T17:20:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed a few changes to the list page.

The two most important are:

1) the introduction of a "confidence score" which is the default view

2) bringing back the number rankings associated with each item (1, 2, 3, etc.)

The Confidence Score reflects how confident we are that the rating is statistically significant. It takes into account a number of different factors like number of ratings, and the distribution of those ratings. The math is actually pretty complex.

For example, check out the beer page. Under the old view, the default view was dominated by a lot of obscure beers with one five star rating apiece.

With our new Confidence Score, you'll see a lot of beers that you've heard of, ordered by how confident we are in the accuracy of the rating:

We are NOT saying the Bud Light is the fifth best beer in the world. We are simply saying that we have a high degree of confidence that Bud Light's rating of 3.05 is accurate.

The practical effect of introducing the Confidence Score is 1) You won't see an item with one 5 star rating outranking an item with 200 ratings and an average score of 4.33; and 2) Our lists will be a bit harder to game

We've also rolled in a few optimization enhancements that seem to be making the site a bit faster.

Music Contest - It's ON

2009-04-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

There are some amazing music reviews coming in as we speak, and still plenty of time left to do some damage.

Who's in?

Email: contest@rateitall.com