Yelp Like You Love It

Tagged as: Food, Review, Useful Mar 03

One thing that the Internet is an amazing tool for is the ability to draw on collective knowledge. By being so easy to reach more people, we are able to better understand things. We can, as a society, collaborate and pool our individual pieces of the puzzle to form a more completely picture. I’m getting away from myself with the metaphors. Anyways, I think that one of the more useful applications of this for me is yelp.com.

Basically I like to eat, and yelp helps me do that well.

So yelp isn’t at all a new website, and I kind of think that a lot of people have already heard of and/or used it before. But it doesn’t matter because you know what? I get to post whatever I want to since this is my site.

I meant to post this quite some time back, but I’ve been sitting on this post for a really long time. And the only reason is because I wanted to upload a picture before I posted a link to my yelp page. How lame is that? How hard is it to get a profile picture nowadays? It took me all of 2 minutes to accomplish that strenuous task.

Personally I’ve found this site to be pretty helpful, and I think that it’s worthwhile to me to be involved with it. The premise is that reviews will be made by people that actually go to different establishments. While I use the site mainly for food, they do have reviews of everything from shopping to entertainment to health centers.

The most useful thing to me seems to be that you can limit your search by location and see a map of where these places are in relation to where you are. Because even though I might be looking for some amazing food, I’m not exactly willing to drive 50 miles to get said amazing food into my mouth. But 5 miles for some pretty reasonably tasty food? Yeah I could go for that. You can also further filter the results based on more specific criteria such as food ethnicity.

Running off of a 5-star system, it’s easy to quickly see how popular a restaurant is. For more in depth (and often rather interesting) reviews, there are the user comments. These usually range from the short and not-too-helpful to the long and exceedingly useful. Many reviewers will describe their entire meal experience, and it helps you get a feel for what a restaurant is like without actually having been there. Sometimes you can find very useful menu suggestions in the comments as well. To reward reviewers, you can designate their comment as one that you thought was either cool, useful, or funny.

There is even a social aspect to this site as you can add friends on it. I’m not sure if that’s something that I’m really going for. According to yelp, I currently have no friends. Haha let’s hope that’s only on yelp!

My own page, with my reviews and info, is derekwong.yelp.com. Check out some places that I’ve been to, but more importantly let’s all help each other out by supporting quality establishments. You’ll be thankful that next time you’re looking for a place to go to on your hot date. Because we all know that the key to the hot date is the food. Personality? Eh. Charm? Blah. Looks? Well you can’t help that anyways.

Gaming Is Always Fun

Tagged as: Contests, Gaming, Review Aug 10

I like games. Some games I like more than others. I’m particularly a fan of word games even though I don’t get to play them all too much nowadays. I like games that involve decision making because that increases the possibility of losing. I like some card games, but I’m no gambling bo. (Why bo? Why not?)

Over at Ramblings From The Marginalized, Steve has just created Quartile. Yes that’s right, he made the game. That is pretty amazing, I think.

So looking at the game, it seems pretty interesting, even if the concept is a bit simple. It seems to me to be a mix of Scrabble and dominos where instead of piecing together words with letters, you place seemingly domino pieces in arithmetically corresponding spaces. I must admit that it even seems simple when I write that, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also look enjoyable! Just look at the Wii, it’s doing so well because it purports to be a simple to use gaming system that focuses on fun rather than complexity!

In any case, he has this pretty cool offer to give away one of his prototype marble sets. (The retail sets are made of wood as that is obviously cheaper to produce.) So check out his site for more information on the whole shebang.

Footlocker Coupon Found, And What?

Tagged as: Internet, Review Jul 17

So I think that one interesting effect of the Internet is the ability for people to find out for themselves what a good price is. There are a plethora of websites out there that can do different things for you. There are sites like fatwallet that allow you to make some money off of your purchases, there are plenty like gotapex and slickdeals that will point you in the right direction for big deals, and there are even sites that will help you find coupons. You could search on google and definitely come up with coupons for particular stores that you want to buy from.

I’ve seen all types of websites that will offer this for you. Many of them are good even if they are frequented by essentially the cheapskates of the land. But they let their money go further, and that’s not a bad thing. I happened onto a Webbyplanet footlocker coupon that seemed to be on a site that one could go to where the coupons are consolidated. They separate the stores by category, and it seems like their site is fairly simple enough. It allows you to access the information that you want to get to without too much surfing, and it’s nice that they’re not trying to endlessly spam you with advertisements in order to get to what you want. I’m not sure that I really like the look of the styling of the site what with the colors, but I suppose that’s always going to be a judgment call.

As for the Footlocker coupon, I’ve had experience with ordering from Footlocker’s site first hand. I have actually ordered a few pairs of athletic shoes from them, and I’ve found the experiences to be quite painless. Although I did once order some cleats with their express shipping, and it didn’t come in time. But then it took so long that it passed their guarantee so I actually got the shipping free. And that’s not half bad! I’ve noticed that the best times to buy are when they have their “friends and family” deal or when they have their clearance sales. Just beware then if you wear anything besides very small or very large shoes.

Anyways so after all of these strange random thoughts, the moral is this: spend some time to use your resources!

Let ‘Em All Make Money

Tagged as: Internet, Money, Review Jun 22

Trying out a ReviewMe to see how I feel about it. I like ReviewMe’s set up because even though they offer to pay you for reviews, they are in no way forcing your hand in what you say. So good or bad, that’s how they roll.

One thing that’s pretty big (okay huge in some places) nowadays is making money off of the Internet. Qoo Forum is an approach to the issue that (as far as I know) is pretty unique. They are trying to start a forum where people can talk about anything they want to. Where does the money making come in? They propose that if you attain a certain point (currently 50 posts) then they will allow you to have a chance to have ads from your Google AdSense Publisher account be placed on the forum itself.

As I described in Inconsiderate Internet Browsing, advertisements work just as they do for other media. Advertisers get to show whatever they want and in turn they pay for that right. Specifically for the Internet, this means that you can get paid for views or you can get paid for the number of clicks on your advertisements.

The look of the site is nice and clean that is easy on the eyes, even if it does seem a little cartoonish because everything on the site has their edges rounded.

As you can somewhat see, they are trying to reach out to as many categories as they possibly can. There are forums within the Qoo forum ranging from music to gadgets to making money to sports! I think that this might be a problem for them in the future. Granted it allows for growth in any which way. However, just like other things with no purpose, it might fall flat on its face just because it does not have a single intention. I know that I have gone to forums simply because they were forums that were much more centered around a main topic. That might have been software or cars, but I went to that forum because there were people there that knew more than I did.

I’m not sure that’s the kind of people that will be attracted to this site. It seems as if the people that will post here are simply people that are in it to get money for themselves. It’s hard to attract the stable reliable posters that are able to answer people’s questions with that kind of mindset. The reason is that those people who frequent forums to help others do so out of the goodness in their hearts. They like helping others. They are not people who are out to make a quick buck.

However, it does seem like they might have something if my thoughts on people is off. The advertisements in each thread are pretty well placed. They blend well with their styling, but they are slightly off-putting because there are just so many of them.

So if you can get an advertisement there, you do seem to have a reasonable chance of making some money. I’m sure that Qoo will also be having much of their own advertisements placed in the site as well (of course they’re revenue sharing, not revenue giving).

This is all of the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality. And that’s not too bad of an idea because it seems like it was easy to set up with existing tools. They’re utilizing vBulletin for their forum software, they had to think of an interesting domain, they need the hardware to host it all, and then they can utilize Google’s existing ad network!

Some things that I saw while looking around where that I wasn’t actually sure how likely you are to get your advertisements on the threads that you start once you hit that magic 50 post level. In the FAQ it says in one place “Currently, you are entitled to 50% chance of showing your ad code within the threads that are started by you” whereas in a similar section it says “Once you have reached that level, your ad code will be applied to all the threads started by you.” That’s confusing to say the least. Additionally I noticed some grammatical errors along the lines of some of the items that I mentioned in Learn Some English (Part 1). They should get someone to give it a good read through and through to give it a more professional feel to it.

All in all, I think that the Qoo Forum has an intriguing idea that might turn out to pan out for lots of people. However, seeing as how they are brand spanking new, I’m not sure how well they will actually do. They are working off of people’s greed, and seeing as how that is very apparent in many people, they just might do alright.

Making Money By Blogging

Tagged as: Internet, Money, Review May 13

So I’m not sure how many of you are aware of how often people actually make money off of blogging. Many of my readers probably are not very acquainted with the idea. They’re accustomed to doing things for free and because they like it. That’s fine and well, but there is in fact a market for actually making money simply by blogging. Amazing isn’t it?

Well now you might be wondering whether blogging is even worth it as a venture to make money. Let me point your attention to a site that teaches you how you can make money online. Even though right now I’m participating in a contest to review his site to get a backlink from his site, this really is a site that I have been subscribing to in my RSS reader.

To start off with, John Chow is a Canadian resident (whom none of you probably actually know personally) who started trying to turn his blog into a money-maker less than a year ago. He writes articles about how he is making money as well as ideas and tips for other people who would want to do the same. He uses his own site as a case study in how money can be made. In every month since he started his blog, he has enjoyed increased revenue. He is a proponent of a lot of different advertisements and partner deals (including the ubiquitous AdSense which I am using). With the combined revenue from all of his sources, he made a bit under $12,000 in the month of April. It’s pretty amazing to see what someone can do with just a blog! Of course the caveat to this for all of you is that his blog is less of a personal one and more of a targeted one. Nevertheless it’s impressive.

Although I generally read all of the articles, I think that the main downside that I see to what he is writing about is that he sometimes hits a ceiling in terms of content. Often (simply by the mere subject matter) there will be repetition in his advice so I can see how this blog will be very interesting initially but could lose interest for readers after they have read it for awhile.

Anyways, I have enjoyed reading about different ideas and methods that he’s used, and I suggest that anyone interested in the topic should take a look at it. This is especially useful for those that are hosting (or paying for hosting) of their own site as there is some cost to running the site.