It’s been a while but Free Fun Friday’s are back, and even better than before. Here at welovelocal we like to reward our local reviewers for their efforts. This week Amanda J really stood out with her great review of Buen Ayre, the lovely Argentine Grill in Hackney. Not only was her review fantastically detailed, but it warmed our heart to see our locals taking heed of the advice from other fellow locals. It was the super helpful list of tips provided by Barnaby C that Amanda J followed when visiting Buen Ayre – real insider information at its best.

We have rustled up a lovely prize this week, following our commitment to great local shops we have a goodie bag of luxury lovelies from the yummy Myddletons delicatessen to send to Amanda J to show our appreciation. Myddletons is a fab deli located in the uber local Amwell Street area. We will be dropping some more subtle hints from now on, and giving out some more great prizes for original reviews that take heed of our hints. So keep a look out!

The votes have been counted and the judges have made their decisions….

Ok, not quite, but we did get lots of really great reviews last week in line with the Wedge card giveaway we ran. It was a pretty tough job trying to pick out five of the best, but as promised, we did show extra love to those of you who managed to review a Wedge card business. The Lucky winners were:

Tom H with his review of 54 Resaurant, ‘Lovely apples, nice gravy beautiful stiff but smooth mash and some nice and fresh cale rounded off a superb dish.’

Miles T with his review of The Ambassador, ‘The staff here were very attentive and the menu-to-stomach time was refreshingly short.’

Joelle M with her review of Askew Eyewear, ‘It’s only small, but their stock is so well chosen that I quickly found several pairs I liked more than any in my trawls round 2 massive high street opticians.’

Brad W with his review of Brick Lane Bikes, ‘The staff are all very helpful and knowledgeable, and all work is done on the spot by their team to guarantee you walk out with the bike in the best possible condition.’

Sarah D with her review of Sh!, ‘The staff are really nice, will answer your questions and make it a thoroughly unembarrassing experience.’

All the reviews were great - thanks guys! If you want to have a look at the full length versions of the winning reviews then just click on the name of the business (above). The shiny new Wedge cards are making their way to the winners as I type (hopefully). I hope you enjoy the lovely discounts that you can now receive - all round the capital. If you didn’t win a Wedge card this time I would strongly recommend getting hold of one of these little lovelies, they offer some really great deals, in some of London’s best independent shops.

Photo by: treehuger.com originally from the Peer Gallery

With the long weekend upon us, and the promise of three rain free days ahead; here’s a few recommendations from the welovelocals to help make the most of the bank holiday come rain or shine.

Keston Lodge: Ashley F. says: ‘ideal for wishing away a long Sunday afternoon; the music is relaxed’

The Dragon Bar: Anita S. says: ‘This bar is shockingly outrageously funky and different!’

Zebrano: Richard H. says: ‘one of the few places you can have a pint of san miguel in the sun in soho’

The Rake: Tim B. says: ‘This is the beer snob’s Vinopolis’

The Lock Tavern: Stewart H. says: ‘the beer garden is a sure fire winner if your looking for a party venue.’

Bodeans BBQ: JP J. says: ‘You’re guaranteed a slab of (or in the case of the exuqisite pulled-pork, shredded) meat which won’t touch the sides as you scoff it down.’

Sketch: Amy L. says: ‘I wanted to go to sketch merely for the infamous alien egg toilets that they have. I didn’t realise that the food was going to be amazing too.’

The Eagle: Vlad T. says ‘You can while away the time waiting by watching the chefs beaver away or simply relax in an environment that looks like it has been decorated with the contents of a old school.’

The Prince of Wales: Joseph C. says: ‘one of the main attractions of the Prince is the offer of a game of Boule. Rent out one of their sets, get yourself a jug of pernod, repair to the gravelled square and toss your boules with gay abandon. Squint and you could be in a small French village.

Smiths of Smithfield: Meg P. says: ‘it’s hard to find fault with the food - tasty, simple dishes with fresh ingredients and served in a quick and non-fussy way, accompanied by some excellent wines.’

That’s right, for the month of July we’re offering a £10 Amazon Gift e-Voucher for sharing your local knowledge. Review ten businesses in London, and as a small thank you in return we’ll email you an Amazon Gift e-Voucher to spend on whatever you like at Amazon.co.uk. Easy.

How does it work?

1. Sign up/login to welovelocal.com.
2. Spruce up your profile with a bit about yourself and a photo.
3. Write 10 reviews of any business in London. We’ll be checking all reviews individually, so we won’t accept any old junk!
4. Once your reviews have been accepted, we’ll email you a £10 Amazon e-Voucher. This should be within 48 hours of submitting your tenth review.
5. Enjoy and go shop!

You can read the full terms and conditions here

Feel free to tell people you know about the offer, welovelocal.com is a much better place with friends.
As you already know, we want to take word of mouth online, so help us build the welovelocal.com community and spread the word, because local’s better with friends.

The news that Google is to begin collecting reviews has unsurprisingly been a hot topic of conversation in the welovelocal office. In the spirit of things we thought that we would add our two pence to the mix.

Google doesn’t do UGC

Google is a search compnay, they’re in the business of finding things so it strikes us as quite an odd move to begin collating reviews. It would have seemed a more prudent move to begin to actively soliciting reviews from partner sites, a process that to us still seems somewhat random.

Information needs context

Prior to Google the internet was a unorganised place, just finding what you were looking for was hard enough. Now, thanks to Google, we crave more than just information, we crave information with context, information that is tailored to the individual, not the crowd. At welovelocal our aim to recommend you businesses based on your tastes, friends, the area in which you live, and by connecting you with people who are of authority on a given location or business area. A good review is one thing, but a good review submitted by someone of the same age and interests, who works close by, is infinitely more useful.

Getting more people reviewing is a good thing

In all honesty we are enthused by any service that gets people in the mood for reviewing. We want the whole country to get in the review mood, and if Google can help us do that then great. If they catch the bug, we’re confident a service like ours will become significantly more rewarding than Google’s reviewing black hole.

Is this really all about eBay?

The fallout between eBay and Google has been well documented. Google is looking to get a piece of that sweet sweet PayPal action with its new Checkout service. What is missing from Checkout is a trust system like eBays Feedback Score: enter reviews and rating to fill the void.

Google isn’t infallible

There has been a lot of hysteria about Google launching reviews and it is worth gently reminding people that Google isn’t infallible, you only need to look at Froogle, Google Answers, and their end of year balance sheet to realise that.

welovelocal welcomes Google to the world of reviews with open arms.

tags: Google, eBay, Reviews, Yelp

When we were in the planning stages of the site, we had a look at a lot of other review sites. Not just local review sites, but every type of review sites to see what works and what didn’t.

What we didn’t want the site to be was one of those reviews where every review is either 5 stars or 1 star. A good example of this is eBay. Look at any user feedback there and it’s nearly always along the lines of “recommended A+++++”. Another example is Amazon, most of the products on there have lots of 5 star reviews, due to the fact that mainly fans of the products will be the ones who review.

Obviously, we’re in a different market to eBay and Amazon, but we all know even looking at one of our rivals right now, their 5 latest reviews are four 5 star reviews and one 1 star review. We thought this wasn’t helpful to anyone. How can anyone decide if a business is any good if every business gets the same amount of stars?

This is why we put meanings with our star rating, with 3 stars being ‘As expected’ and so on. We felt this was a fairer way to review. Of course, we were expecting there to be more reviews above three stars than below it, due to various reasons. People tend not to go to bad businesses in the first place, users might get more put off giving a business 1 star if their profile is next to their review, etc.

However, with our rating system, we’ve found that people are much more likely to give 3 and 4 star reviews rather than 5 and 1 star reviews. Our average review score is 3.50, almost exactly half way between 3 and 4 star in fact, which is a lot more useful than everything being 5 stars.

We like giving people good recommendations, that’s part of what we do, so the only way to do this is with accurate reviews and clearer, precise ratings.

Like most web developers, I just love to spend my summer lunch times sitting inside at a computer, doing data mining. I am a bit of a statistics junkie, I love stats, so this is probably the first in a series of statistics-related posts. Hold on, don’t run away just yet!

One of the areas I’ve been looking into is reviews, it’s fascinating what people review sometimes and how they describe the service they get. What I’ve done is gathered all our reviews together and chopped them up into little bits. Then, I’ve counted up all the little similar bits and stuck them back together. In essence, counted the amount of times a word appears. You can probably guess the top words… ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘is’ and ‘to’ are our top five words, but being reviews, I don’t care about the boring common words like this. I’m far more interested in how people describe the businesses they’ve used.

I’ve complied a list of common adjectives such as ‘good’, ‘great’ and ‘terrible’, the words you expect in reviews and compared them against how often they appear. Admittedly, I haven’t factored in phrases, so for example, ‘definitely not good’ would appear as ‘good’ which it isn’t, but I’m sure they will cancel each other out to some extent. So here’s the results…

So c’mon people! Let’s get our dictionaries out and stop using the word ‘good’!

As you know welovelocal.com is all about ratings and reviews, we want to find out about the places you love to use and trust. Unsurprisingly, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to rate a business and how to ensure that the ratings you provide present the truest picture of what you thought of that particular business.

Ratings are great, but they need to presented in a meaningful context. We all understand that five stars means that whatever is being reviewed is considered as something good, and one star not so good, however, without understanding how a rating correlates to the experience of the person reviewing can lead to potentially less helpful feedback.

How so? Two main reasons. Firstly, people tend to be predicated towards expressing their opinion at either end of the scale, so if you look at most review websites you’ll to find ratings at each extreme of the scale, they either love something or they hate it (take a look at Amazon the next time you’re buying books and you’ll see what I mean). Nothing ever seems to be so-so.

Secondly, very few websites actually correlate a star rating to any criteria, so one person thinks three stars means ‘good’ and another considers it to mean ‘average’. When we ran some testing earlier this year, without specifying any criteria to each star rating we also found this to be the case too.

With welovelocal.com, we have adopted a subtler approach. When you rate a business, we want you to share how your experience fared in relation to your expectation. Why? Well, the places I love may not be considered so by my mum or even my work colleagues. We all have different tastes, preferences, likes and importantly expectations. By providing a profile and reading your other reviews, locals can get a better idea what you are like and also the type of expectations you’re likely to have when you use a local business or service.

It may seem like a small thing, but we hope it will make it easier for you to trust the reviews submitted by our locals and avoid coming across endless five and one star reviews.