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Justin’s upcoming post about the Yelp review filtering system, the new version of Pluggio, looking forward to MicroConf, Freeman Dyson and his global warming heresy, a La Critique of RootBuzz, more thoughts on simulating the zombie apocalypse, island economics and the danger of extreme wealth inequality, TBTF banks and thoughts on the MF Global fiasco, Matt Tiabbi’s coverage of Wall Street’s endemic corruption and why William Black thinks the American JOBS Act will introduce fraud, $10 million loans for everyone, how Iran is reverse engineering a downed U.S. drone, why CENTCOM’s Operation Earnest Voice will ultimately be turned inward like the NSA’s Operation Stellar Wind and completing the AnyFu payout cycle.
Executive Producer $50 – Andrea Conti – Your targeted website in a snap
@Justin Wow your post blew up on Hacker News! Good job 🙂
Justin,
Unfortunately I don’t think Yelp needs help fixing their system but rather they have learned how to make money out of their filtering system. Not only that but a quick search on the internet you can find different people facing issues with Yelp, their “sales” representatives, and their review system.
Understanding Yelp, The Review Filter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqi-jjbEKcs
“Yelp Hit With Class Action Lawsuit For Running An “Extortion Scheme””
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/24/yelp-class-action-lawsuit/
“A Yelp sales rep promised he could remove bad reviews for a $500 membership fee. Then threatened that bad reviews would be highlighted and good ones would disappear. That’s exactly what happened. Yelp.com Stands Accused of Acting Like a “Modern-Day Mafia””
http://www.newworldorderreport.com/Default.aspx?tabid=266&ID=3285
“How You Can Get Around Yelp’s Pesky Review Filter”
http://www.servicemagicproconnection.com/how-you-can-get-around-yelp%E2%80%99s-pesky-review-filter/
Own Yelp “filter” twiiter account:
https://twitter.com/#!/fightyelpfilter
“Yelp filter system hurts small business owners.”
http://www.yelp.com/topic/seal-beach-yelp-filter-system-hurts-small-business-owners
A very well written post (IMO) about the subject
“Yelp Review Filter Explained (How do I spam that?)”
http://www.searchinfluence.com/2010/03/yelp-review-filter-explained/
As you can see time after time people have posted their own bad experience with the service. Will Yelp listen? Well, lets say the video linked above was first published in YouTube in March 18, 2010. A little over 2 years ago and things have not changed.
It would be nice to see what kind of impact your experience will do to the Yelp community as a whole but in the end I would not be surprised if you just got a call or an email expressing how sorry they are for the bad experience and hope that everyone moves on. After all, how many man hours can you really dedicate to fix this issue?
I need to make a correction on my last link, here is the right link:
A very well written post (IMO) about the subject
The Yelp Review Filter
-What is the Yelp Review Filter and why should you care?
http://www.searchinfluence.com/articles/yelp-review-filter/
I see that in an early version of the article you actually mentioned the name of the company but I guess in the final version you removed it.
Wouldn’t it do more damage to them if you put their company name in the text and get your SEO buddies to help get it ranked as close as possible to the Yelp page?
I wouldn’t let my worst enemies use them.
The simple traditional argument as to why a small amount of inflation is a good thing is that it encourages people to spend their money. It encourages trade. Because the money you have today will be worth slightly less tomorrow.
With no inflation or deflation people hoard money.
An interesting point is that inflation doesn’t refer to prices but the money supply. People often say that the Fed printing more money will lead to inflation. The Fed printing more money is inflation. The money supply has “inflated”, the rising of prices is an effect of inflation.
But I agree with the sentiment quotes by Jason on the podcast, economics is “the dismal science”. This is because (like psychology and the social “sciences” in general) it focuses far too much emphasis on elegant description and far too little emphasis on accurate prediction.
Cheers
Sam
That’s kind of funny about the intro. I couldn’t figure out for a long time what Jason’s daughter was saying at the end of the intro. After a few episodes I thought I succeeded in guessing that she’s saying “Beckham!”. I guess this was in the context that you also speak about soccer sometimes in your family life. So it’s “Soundcloud dot com”.
@Sam Howley – You’re absolutely right about inflation. Sometimes when we meander into subjects that I haven’t thought about recently, I end up stumbling all over place and do a poor job of explaining things. I guess that’s why teachers need to review lesson material and prepare examples before they teach a class. 😉
@Mohammed – I don’t think it would be prudent to be linked to them in google search results for various obvious reasons.
Justin, i’m just looking at the Pluggio redesign – it looks fantastic. Awesome job!
@Eoin
I just listened to the bit about the “intro” and all I can say is ROFLMAO !!!!
The question I asked was this:
What part of the show is the “beginnign of a show” ? 😉
If you read the quoted part carefully, you will see the typo that I was too subtly referring to. It is on the donation page. When the guys went on the tangent I was close to tears in laughter!
P.S. I thought that the intro talk was some cute gibberish but now that I know, I can hear it clearly as well 😀
Check out the findings of Richard Mueller regarding global warming. He’s a physicist and a (former) global warming skeptic. He spent two years investigating the subject quite thoroughly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/opinion/dr-mullers-findings-on-global-warming.html
Maybe it’s me listening podcasts at 2x. Or maybe it’s something else. But as long as the intro has been there, I have always heard ‘This show is so stupid’ 😀
I remember someone sending in a clip of their kid saying something like this and did put these two together. I never understood why you would use something like this, but found it very amusing 🙂
@Andrea
You forgot to mention the really important fact: Are you male or female? 🙂
——————-
IMHO the RootBuzz.com pricing is waaaayyyyy too high. 1/4 cent per pageview means 10$ / month with only 4000 pageviews.
Users will probably generate 5-10 pageviews per visit on average.
To me this seems very expensive.
@Christoph
All will be revealed at MicroConf. Are you going?
@Andrea – I just had to look up ROFLMAO:
“This Awesome Accumulation of letters means Rolling on Floor Laughing My Ass Off”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=roflmao
That’s funny, I didn’t realize it was that unclear what my daughters Izzy and Ari were saying, which for the record is:
“This show is distributed by SoundCloud dot com.”
But I’m glad we got that all cleared up. 😉
BTW, the inspiration for that intro was the “I made this” spoken at the end of the X-Files closing credits for Chris Carter’s Ten Thirteen production company:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6va9B9DNX5I
X-Files is my all-time favorite show.
@Andrew – Thanks, that’s interesting.
In retrospect, I probably should have avoided even answering Justin’s question on the subject due to the fact that it’s a politically charged minefield that I haven’t really kept up with.
@Christoph – You may be right that the pricing is too high, but I still think that pricing by the view is the right model.
@Jason
I usually put the words for an acronym as well the first time but figured it would be an easy search if it was not known.
Amazing how your kids are easy to understand when to others it sounds like sounds 🙂
Hey guys,
Thanks for the critique!
just a few notes:
– We don’t charge for crawler traffic, what you see in google analytics should be pretty close to what you see on your bill.
– We’re planning to have tiered pricing a la Amazon (so $0.0025/pageview will be for the first X thousand page views, then a lower price until the next threshold, etc)
– We’re going to start A/B testing traditional pricing plans like Justin is talking about to see how it affects conversion rates.
@Christoph An aside about being expensive: I think the tiered pricing we’re putting together right now should alleviate that, but it’s also worth considering that it’s not just hosting, it’s also a Saas product that is constantly being updated.
I think the pricing strategy we’re working on right now is pretty competitive with the Average CPM our beta users would expect to pay for the kind of targeted keywords that Q&A software naturally ranks for in search engines.
Thanks for the awesome show guys!
Good episode guys. Congrats to @Justin on his super yelp letter.
Yelp has a tough business model. They want businesses to pay for listing and customers to vote art no cost which creates a bias rating system. Another bias is voters typically being customers who had a bad experience.
Unfortunately the moving company model is not uncommon. Many businesses act as an agent for sub contractors. It usually means you have no idea on the quality. When something breaks, it seriously goes bad. A good company would do all they can to compensate and manage customer expectations.
Another rating system that may be broken is google. We picked a cleaning company that had 20+ 5 star ratings. No negative feedback or low ratings. Our experience wad absolutely terrible. We posted a 1 star review. Our review never appeared! We believe the company owner could control and moderate the Google page!
MicroConf 2012 was so good the guys are still recovering 🙂