reviews

MojoPages: Media-rich user reviews with karma

MojoPages is a new user review site that launched last week. It's similar to Yelp, but MojoPages users can post video clips and pictures to individual reviews about restaurants and local attractions.

In addition to offering a free-form template to create your written masterpiece, MojoPages gives you a form on which you can rate each establishment's value, service, and quality--things often mentioned in a well-written review.

One of the other standouts of MojoPages is the implementation of user photos. Instead of just uploading photos to an establishment's profile page, you can add them to each review. This … Read more

Yellowpages.com vs. Yelp: User reviews compared

This week Yellowpages.com added user reviews to their directory service. Much like Yelp, the new system allows registered users to post one- to five-star reviews of local establishments. I decided to compare experiences using both sites to see how they stack up.

Round 1: User registration and benefits

Registering with Yellowpages grants you a few small perks, such as 100 slots to save your favorite establishments. You also get to save personal addresses and keep track of your last 20 searches. Yelp goes a little bit further with a friends list, a small counter under your name with how … Read more

Boorah "Zagatizes" restaurant reviews from the Web

Boorah, a new restaurant reviews site, scrapes the Web for criticism and generates Zagat-style evaluations. (Lawsuits are sure to follow.)

Unlike Zagat, which has its own volunteer army of reviewers, Boorah scours reviews from sites like Insider Pages, SFGate, and blogs, and extracts content from them. The site parses all the data and assigns scores for food, ambiance, and service for each restaurant.

The site has a relationship with OpenTable (my favorite Web site ever) and will let you make direct reservations for restaurants that take them.

What I liked about Boorah: it has a very good search engine, … Read more

PowerReviews: Cleverest user reviews site so far

Found at the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup last night: PowerReviews, yet another site that collects user reviews (see also ViewScore, Wize, Retrevo, DigitalAdvisor, and TheFind). But in a diabolically clever way: The company's first product, which has been out for a while, is a technology platform that online retailers use to collect user reviews for the items they sell. Businesses using the technology include J&R Electronics, Adorama, Ritz Camera, and Walgreens. PowerReviews provides user reviews technology free to these and other businesses. In return, it gets rights to repurpose the reviews on its own aggregation site. … Read more

Urbis: 'Creative Republic' shows potential, faces threat of 'Myspaceyness'

I have a background in creative writing, so I was very excited to hear that one of the presentations at last night's NY Tech Meetup would be a demonstration of a new kind of Web community for writers (and eventually artists, musicians, and filmmakers). Indeed, the first presentation was of Urbis, which is a new review community founded by local New Yorker Steve Spurgat. Meetup founder Scott Heiferman described Spurgat, with his background as a playwright, as "the most unlikely Internet entrepreneur."

Here's the central concept of Urbis, which according to Spurgat has 12,000 members … Read more

Get clear feedback on creative work with ConceptShare

ConceptShare is a new service, close to being released, that gives creative pros an intuitive way to share their work with clients and coworkers. Essentially, it's just a repository for images that people can add notes to, but it's focused and straightforward, it has a very clear interface, and it's unlikely to confuse clients.

The Flash-based interface makes it very easy to switch between different images (or "concepts") and see the notes that people have left on each. You can toggle quickly between different images and easily spot small tweaks between different concepts. Designers can … Read more