Rating the Reviews, Reviewing the Ratings

We’ve had ratings and reviews available on Zenbu for over a year now. Recommendations are a natural part of everyday life - 

Where can I get some good Chinese takeaways around here?
Who is your dentist / plumber / hairdresser?

The ability to get feedback on an otherwise unknown business is extremely valuable. It is why good businesses flourish through word of mouth and bad businesses fail.

So it is with mixed feelings that we have just removed ratings and reviews from the site. I like the way this has reduced clutter in the page layout and I like the focus on the simple facts but I miss the potential that was offered by online reviews.

I simply wasn’t happy with the implementation or results. The uptake was slow and the signal to noise ratio was extremely low. Of 100 reviews 80 would be either the business owner posing as an employee to rave about themselves, or a slighted customer vehemently expressing their opinion. Now I do believe there is some minor value in both of these but it also leads us down the deep, dark rabbit hole of ‘editorial’, ‘owner’s right of reply’ & ‘libel’. Nasty.

There is beauty in the simplicity of Zenbu and the way it quickly provides you with the need to know factual details. That is something that we and our rapidly growing userbase definitely rates highly.

October 2008 on Zenbu

I am a bit late in posting this monthly review, in fact I completely forgot! Luckily a keen reader called me on it so here it is. Sorry for the delay. (The actual numbers are always available in real time from www.zenbu.co.nz/recent if I am late)

1690 edits from 92 users in October.  Thanks to everyone who took part. The big editors were

zenbu 739
GaryMck 308
hexzed 171
Glars 109
burgla 44
Addwords 37
barnaclebarnes 34
2dollarshop 23
HiggyRSQ 20
kitchen 18
MauriceWinn 16
vrod_rider 12
pablothesquirrel 10
Asgard 10

Some more of the local councils came to the party. Kawerau (thanks to barnaclebarnes), Nelson, and Invercargill (thanks to GaryMck). A few more councils (Napier, Ruapehu) surprised me by flat out declining to provide the information citing the privacy act. There are several problems with this to me

1. The privacy act applies to “living persons”, not businesses.

2. The trading name and physical address of a business which serves the public (part of the reason they require an Environmental Health license) is already in the public domain. I can walk down the street and see it. How can this be private?

3. I claim common sense, not legal knowledge, so I could be entirely wrong in the above, or the law may not reflect common sense, in which case all the councils who have provided the information must have been breaking the Privacy Act to do so. To date 15 councils have supplied the information free of charge, 3 more have offered the information for a fee [surely charging fees to provide privacy protected data would be cause for an enquiry!] and only 2 have claimed the privacy act. Another 18 have not responded, despite a legal requirement to do so, but that’s a different issue….

The only option left is to take the matter to http://www.ombudsmen.parliament.nz. (The Ombudsman is an independent investigator who investigates complaints about the administrative acts and decisions of central and local government agencies.) No progress beyond the notification of receipt so far, I’ll keep the blog posted.

Where To Vote

The NZ General Election is this Saturday Nov 8. I received my voting pack on the weekend and the data-geek in me started thinking about the Polling Places database. These are generally schools, church and community halls; the schools are all in Zenbu but a lot of the other places aren’t. It took me 15 minutes to pull down all the polling places and parse it into a spreadsheet from the Elections website (Crown Copyright – Last Update: 18 Sep 2008). [Thanks to the Crown for making it easy with a semantically marked-up website!]

It’s probably too late for anyone to do anything nifty with this (FindMyNearestPollingPlace.org.nz?) but here is the spreadsheet of data anyway.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pvgkckMddqYGfRWn6T4VPNA

Remember to vote on Saturday!