The Lists of 2009

OK, we're closing out another year here on RIA, and I wanted to surface a few of the lists that people have made about this last year of the 00's. Here we go:

Movies of 2009
Baseball HOF 2009 Candidates
Number One Songs of 2009
E3 Video Games of 2009
Events of 2009
2009 Oscar Nominees
2009's Dead Celebrities
Sports Stories of 2009
Obama Report Card 2009

Top Rated Video Game Systems

It's officially time for last (last!) minute Christmas shopping. Are you completely stuck? Give the gift of gaming.

As for which system to buy, RateItAll can provide you all the information you need with its Top Rated Video Game Systems list.

Check out these reviews:

Sony PlayStation 2 - " The best console for gaming ever released. It has lived a long plentiful life and is still alive. Companies continue to release better games for the PS2 pushing the limits of its aging processors..." read more.

Microsoft Xbox - " I didn't like it when it first came out and I don't like it now, not many exclusive titles are on it that I would consider AAA's, other than Forza, Halo, DOA, and Ninja Gaiden there isn't much that comes to mind..." read more.

Nintendo Wii - " The Nintendo Wii is a great family gaming system. That does mean it may not be ideal for serious gamers..." read more.

Nintendo GameCube - " When I played Super Mario Sunshine, I saw just how impressive Nintendo's GameCube is. The graphics that are on some of these games are marvelous. This is a damn good game system indeed..." read more.

Microsoft Xbox 360 - "I got this for my Birthday in May and so far everything's great. I got the limited edition 360 that included Halo3 and Fable 2 with it so that was a nice surprise..." read more.

Oh! He doesn't like playing video games... see other options on this guide of 2009 Best Christmas Gifts for Men.

In the News: December 21

Here are a few events from over the Weekend:

World Leaders, including President Obama, gathered in Copenhagen to sign a new climate deal.

Prime Minister Berlusconi was attacked by a man in Milan, using a replica of the Duomo of Milano as a weapon.

Sadly, our 2009's Dead Celebrities list was joined by actress Brittany Murphy and Oral Roberts.

Finally Avatar came out, and early reviews seem to be very positive.

In the tech world, we heard last Thursday about rumors (via Techcrunch) of Yelp being acquired by Google. As of Monday December 21st, the deal seems to have stalled.

Two Nominations for Rant of the Day

There were lots of entertaining rants on RIA today. There always are.

But there were two rants in particular that stood out.

1) Irishgit, reviewing his ex Mother in Law. Here's a taste:

"...The second was some kind of denizen of the Seventh Circle of Hell who had taken time out from tormenting poor sinners to inflict herself on earth. She hasn't said a kind word about anyone since the Truman administration, is a full-blown hypochondriac who insists on special treatment for her largely imaginary woes, combines a vicious tongue with an incredibly thin skin, is ignorant in a way that requires considerable effort to maintain, weighs about as much as the John F. Kennedy (the aircraft carrier, not the president) and detests, check that, loathes with every atom of her being, each of her sons or daughters in law...." see the full post.

2) LivUVA's review of Ronald Reagan National Airport. Here's a taste:

"...Yeah, ok, I normally like terminals B and C. They seem to have their $hit together. But on last Friday afternoon, for whatever reason, TSA apparently lacked the normal D team they bring to the airport game and opted for the F team in Terminal A...." see the full post.

Don't hold back folks, tell us how you really feel....

What we Tweeted: December 17, 2009

For those of you who don't follow us on Twitter, here is a summary of our most recent tweets.

Some fun tweets were The Robot Hall of Fame, and the Most Popular Holidays TV Specials.

We also helped our followers to discover The Best Art Museums in the World and to ride public transportation in major cities with The Best Mass Transit Systems list.

For snow-sport fans, we highlighted our guide to The Best Ski Resorts in California. If California is not an option for you, find other resorts on RIA's ski resorts guide.

We also pointed out the passing of Oral Roberts.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Oral Roberts, pioneer of TV evangelism, dies at 91 (guardian.co.uk)

National Rate Your Cell Phone Day

Today is national "Rate Your Cell Phone" Day.

Well, not really.

But given as we have just updated our Best Cell Phone list with a bunch of top new models the LG Cookie, the Samsung Mythic, the HTC Pure, the LG Chocolate Touch, and the LG Shine, we figured we'd take matters into our own hands.

And yes, we also have the Apple iPhone listed, which happens to be the fastest selling gadget in history.

So let's do this - please rate your Cell Phone.

In the News: December 15

In the news today (with links to the appropriate RateItAll page):

- The women of Tiger Woods (story still going strong)

- The ongoing Health Care debate

- Google is coming out with their own phone - watch this page for Google Nexus reviews

- Roy Halladay is on the verge of signing with the Phillies

- Glee is doing well at the Golden Globes

- Wells Fargo is trying to repay its TARP funds

Related articles by Zemanta

• Wells Fargo to repay US bail-out (news.bbc.co.uk)

Big Ad, Small Ad

Some of us like Big Ads when we browse RateItAll.

And some of like Small Ads.

Rather than make a value judgment on which is better, we've thoughtfully decided to try and please everyone.

If you would like to see Big Ads, all you have to do is log out.

If you would like to see Small Ads, all you have to do is log in.

Go ahead, try it out on this list of Best American Beaches.

Tweeted This Week: 12/11/2009

Yes, RateItAll has a Twitter account. We have used it pretty sparingly so far, and typically only tweet a few times a day with lists that catch our eye. Here are some of the lists that we tweeted this week:

Best Mass Transit System

Best California Ski Resort

Best Guitarist of All Time

Worst US State Flag?

The Women of Tiger Woods

We also retweeted some of Jedi58's awesome travel reviews of Cairo, Venice, and Naples.

So if you're just getting going on Twitter, please follow us - we'll be interesting, we promise.

Top Rated Christmas Gifts for Men

One of our interns, Nicholas, spent a good deal of time pulling together a list of top rated gifts for men this season across a variety of different personality types; techie, gamer, etc.

I think he did a great job - check out this full list of Best Christmas Gifts for Men (this also went out as a newsletter).

Flooding the System with Votes (Continued)

It's fun when a site tweak works as hoped.

Check out this graph of total review votes posted on RateItAll. Can anyone spot the day that we rolled in the voting changes? We'll see if the increased volume holds, but for now, it would appear that this enhancement is exceeding our expectations.

Congrats to RateItAll's design and engineering teams for a job well done.

Getting More Review Votes into the System

When I take the time to post a review on RIA, it's nice to know that people read it. RateItAll tries to provide a couple of different ways that readers of a review can react to reviews on the site. There's the commenting feature, which I think has been a great addition. There's the compliments feature, which is a little more buried, but which is also a nice way to tell folks that you like what they have to say. And then finally, there is the voting feature, which allows people to vote on if a review is helpful, funny, or if they agree with it.

This last feature has been the source of much entertainment and drama over the years. There are some people who can tell you how many votes they get on a daily, or even hourly basis. There are others who will get enraged if they get a disagree vote. There are some that like to drop funny votes at unexpected times. And finally, there are even those that have undertaken elaborate and sophisticated schemes to get, or give, a few more extra votes than they were entitled to.

This fascination with votes might strike outsiders as odd. Why should we care what others think of our reviews?

I know I care.

I think it has to do with the fact that when you take a time to write a review, it's nice to know that people out there are reading it. Even more than if people find my review helpful or agree with it, I care that they read it. I'll take a "disagree" vote over no vote any day of the week.

So with this philosophy in mind, we are going to try out a couple of different things this week to see if we can get some more votes into the system.

The first change you'll notice later this week is a design change that allows for one click voting. Currently, you have to click a link that says "vote," and then choose your selection. That means it can take up to four clicks to react to a review. This will be changing soon.

The second change has to do with expanding the universe of people who can vote on a review. More on this to follow.

Here are RIA HQ, we are curious as to whether a couple of simple changes can bring more votes into the system. There is only one way to find out.

Related Lists

Last week, we quietly launched a neat new feature that displays topically related lists on our most popular list pages. The goal is pretty simple - to provide an additional way to discover high quality, entertaining / helpful lists related to the one you are browsing.

For example, on the Mexican Beer list, you will now see a module called "Related Lists" in the upper right hand side. In this module, you can see links to lists like our main Beer Reviews section, the list of drinking games, a list of Mexico Attractions, and our Tequila Ratings section.

This feature is part automated, and part manual. We are rolling it out slowly to high traffic lists on the site, so keep your eyes out for it.

Spam and the Spammy Spammers who Spam Us

Sigh.

We've spent the last few days battling spammers who are using hundreds of IP addresses to post links to spammy employment, hosting, and pill websites.

These folks are trying to break the Internet. Our small but scrappy team is circling the wagons in attempt to keep our little corner of the web in the Light.

Sadly, today we had to pull the nuclear option on the country of India. Users with IP addresses originating in India will no longer be able to access RateItAll until we can get the spam agencies off our backs.

To friends of RateItAll in India, we hope this is a temporary measure. And we apologize for such drastic measures - we just don't have the resources to continue to fight these spam shops.

And truth be told, it appears that these spam agencies have at least two US companies funding them. We are in the process of seeing what our legal options are for going after the purse strings.

Building out our Art Section

We're experimenting with a new tool that let's create lists on the fly of pretty much any topic. We're trying it out by building some lists of some of the greatest works by the greatest artists - some of the descriptions might look a little screwy, but the images of the art should be accurate.

Check it out:

Degas Paintings
Kahlo Paintings
Da Vinci Paintings
Rivera Paintings
Van Gogh Paintings

I also used the tool to build out a list of Mexican Presidents - and took a bit more care with the descriptions.

How to Add a Photo to a Review

We are starting to see more and more photos added to reviews. Photos can be particularly helpful for things like restaurant reviews, travel reviews, and even, beverage reviews.

So how do you drop a photo into a review? There are a couple of ways.

1) Far and away the easiest way is to use our emailed reviews feature. Just look for the "email your review" link on any item page, and attach the image to the email:


One note on this: make sure that you are sending the email from the same email address that is linked to your RateItAll account. If you send it from a different email address, a new RateItAll account will be created.

2) You can use image hosting services like Flickr, ImageShack, or PhotoBucket. Upload your photo to one of those services, and look for the embed code option (similar to embedding a YouTube video).

We will likely be looking at more ways to include photos in reviews. It seems like this might be something that would be handy from a mobile device as well.

Please Welcome our Fabulous New Interns

All, please take a second and say hi to RateItAll's amazing and talented new interns: Barbara, Yulia, and Nicholas.

They will be helping us get the site ready for the Holiday shopping season, as well as working on our new mobile project (details coming).

List Your Business / Product / Site on RateItAll

This month, nearly 1.4M people will visit RateItAll.com and many, many more will see RateItAll reviews on other sites.

Putting your product / business / site / blog on RIA is a great way to get more exposure, and to get folks talking about your product.

Listing is free - just use this link.

Here are a few things you get access to by listing your stuff on RateItAll:

You get editorial control over the description, links, and images on the page (alas, not the reviews).

You get access to our cool ratings / testimonials widget for your site. This lets people read and write reviews of your biz / product without having to leave your site. It looks like this:



You get access to the "Loved on RateItAll" seal / badge. It looks like this:



You get access to our really cool emailed reviews feature, and an email address just for your business. Try it out by emailing a review of RateItAll.

You also get things like email alerts of new reviews of your business, commenting tools, and RSS feeds for your business' reviews.

The price for all of this is $0.00. We think it's a pretty good deal. Click through to get listed.

Getting More Votes into the System

One of the things we are looking at right now is how to get more votes (helpful / funny / agree) into the system. Currently, voting on a review is a multiple click process. One click to open the voting box, and then more depending on how you are voting. We are going to try and make this simpler.

The second piece of this is looking at how we might expand the universe of people able to vote on the helpfulness of a review.

As a fairly prolific RIA reviewers, I know I enjoy getting votes and comments on my reviews. Making this feature easier and available to more people should help me (and everyone else) get more votes.

So what are we working on these days?

It's been a while since we've posted on the blog, and I wanted to check in and let folks know what we've been working on:

• Revenue. Yes, we have to pay the bills. The biggest thing we've added recently is pricing information on all of our product pages. You'll notice on any product page, you will now see the best prices from various merchants, as well as pictures of the product. For example, check out the prices on the iPod Touch Reviews page.
• Adding Stuff to the Site. Typically, the holiday shopping season is a very important time for RIA, and it's crucial that we have coverage for what people are shopping for. One of the sections that's grown the most recently is our Home & Garden reviews section - take a peek to see the kinds of things we've been adding to the site.
• Mobile. We are working on some VERY cool stuff around accessing RIA from your cell phone. Stay tuned.

Finally, we've started to work on getting the Longtail content out of the main river. Our friends at Longtail have an extremely popular video player, which sometimes has a RateItAll ratings plugin attached to it. Everytime someone rates a video, that rating shows up in the main "everyone" river. Our rating plugin is on something like 400K sites, meaning there is a tremendous amount of Longtail activity on the site - way more than we expected. We're working on ways to make this high volume activity, uh, less visible to visitors to RateItAll.com.

That's it for now. We have more good stuff in the pipeline... stay tuned.