rambling blog entry

Just an assorted mish-mash of things that have caught my eye lately.

Interesting article in The Times yesterday about Generation Zero, young people who are trying to reduce down their physical possessions to the bare minimum.

A few thoughts arising,

this makes most sense if you do not own a house, once you own a house you rapidly start to accumulate vast volumes of stuff. I think a lot of this stuff really belongs to the house, rather than to you as an individual.

this makes more sense now that you can live a lot of your life online, you don't need to keep letters when you have emails, you don't have to keep physical photos when they are on your hard drive, ...

this makes more sense if you have gone digital with your media, so a downloaded album does not count as a possession it is just more bits on your hard drive.

just because you do not have a lot of physical possesions does not mean that you are living some ascetic life. You could be living in Starbucks, downloading material from iTunes in bulk, running an expensive mobile phone and subscribing to any number of online cloud services.

It does all rather paint a picture of someone with a laptop in one hand, an iPhone in the other, living in rented accomodation ready to move on at the drop of a hat but more at home in the online world.

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Interesting article the other day about Google doing a survey that reckoned that the online economy was now seven percent (I've not checked, this could be rubbish) of the total economy. Not sure that this is entirely credible, I suspect that it must include some mobile phone stuff etc that you would not really think of as internet, and that not much of the big money is actually being earned by UK companies, but interesting nonetheless. All part of the gradual process of people stopping seeing physical shopping as a passtime and using online for more and more of their shopping.

At the moment my online shopping is getting a bit annoying, a few orders still not arrived after over a week. Maybe the internet commerce is reaching another of those step change moments where capacity needs to ratchet up by a significant amount in order to meet demand.

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In terms of growing my investments I think I need to work to orders of magnitude, so that once I have reached one milestone in terms of orders of magnitude the next target is to aim for the next order of magnitude, even it it is something that is going to take years. Once you have got to 100, getting to 200 is less of a challenge. Probably something that might apply to growing a business too, otherwise you make the mistake of just thinking in terms of too many little baby steps, rather than really growing the business.

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My Amazon reviewer ranking has now leapt to 5997, though rising through the ranks is increasingly more mysterious, a few additional reviews make no difference to the rankings, and then suddenly I have rising a big chunk up the ratings.

Normally I think that there is no point to hundreds of reviews of the same product, but I actually found myself browsing through the reviews for the iPod Classic, and I was appreciative of the large number of reviews just to guage how much of a problem hard drive reliability actually was. Obviously for a book or a film, there remains little point to hundreds of reviews.

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Blogs are getting a bit tired, but I am not sure what there is to replace them, just where is the cutting edge at these days?

Amazon New Reviewer ranking 7104

I've not been doing much blogging of late. However I have been distracted by writing Amazon reviews. In a fine piece of social engineering Amazon ranks their reviewers. I tend to rely on Amazon reviews for making purchasing decisions, so in the past where there have not been many reviews online, I've posted the odd review. A few longstanding reviews attracted helpful votes over the years and I had a reviewer ranking of around 11,000.

Intrigued and feeling competitive, I decided to try and up my ranking. Simply by posting reviews of recent purchases, it was relatively easy to get above 10,000. It took a more concerted effort to advance beyond that. Posting a batch of reviews over a weekend initially managed to raise me a thousand points in the rankings, but lately I seem to be sticking in the seven thousand range. Posting additional reviews now does not seem to make a huge difference.

Amazon has secret algorithms for ranking purposes. To be honest I suspect that calling them 'secret' probably covers for the fact that they get changed around from time to time, and are not applied in a terribly systematic fashion.

I suppose the variables that apply to rankings could be
number of reviews - more better
helpful votes - more better
unhelpful votes - less better
product ratings offered - higher better
date of posting - more recent better

also possible factors, other Amazon activity, number of people viewing your reviews, tracking of those who vote, etc

In terms of devising a strategy, it would appear that 'you would be a fool not to...'
post reviews regularly and often
post reviews likely to get favourable votes,
review items that do not have a lot of reviews
review items that attract a lot of viewers
obviously the above two are difficult to meet at the same time, plenty of obscure products have no reviews, few popular products have no reviews
look at those in the rankings to see whether they are doing something that you are not

Logically, getting up the rankings will get harder, the higher ranked you are. That said, the more reviews you have out there, the more you are likely to be attracting positive votes. It is interesting to note where you are on the rankings and the relevant statitistics for those around you. Presumably if you are posting more reviews than them, then you should eventually rise above them.

Amazon re-ranks people every 24 hours, but from observation the higher you rise up the rankings, the less dramatic any changes will be.

Amazon has introduced a Vine programme, whereby highly ranked reviewers can be offered free material for review. I suppose if you were on the Vine programme, you could always sell off stuff that you had got for nothing. That said, the number one reviewer, Peter Durward Harris has been unemployed for some time, so a high ranking is not the passport to riches and fame.

Personally, I like the idea of reviewing products as a way of promoting things that I think are good, and hopefully drawing people's attention to things that they will like, but might not have been aware of. I tend to review things I know about, so as my tastes are not mainstream, I will never be getting thousands of helpful votes for anything. However, hopefully my reviews are helpful to people.

An awful lot of people say that they want to write to reach out to people, and in its way writing reviews for Amazon does this in a very direct way, albeit limited to how they might choose to spend their money.

Reviewers tend to be helpful and positive about products, although Amazon does have some quirks, you cannot mention prices or cite external weblinks, they don't mind publishing damning reviews. To be honest I don't suppose anyone at Amazon head office ever reads most of them. My reviews are mostly posted instantly, a handful appear the next day, and where I have fallen foul of the rules they are not published at all.

Amazon is really in the information business, it tracks what you look at, what you buy, it is not just when we post reviews that Amazon is benefitting from our opinions, decisions and clicks. It could be argued that reviewers are working for nothing, and that it would be nice to get some recognition.

Part of the appeal of doing reviews is that it is the ultimate flexible work, do it if you want, don't if you don't. It does not take a lot of effort for the most part, unless you are only reading a book so that you can review it!

I think that paying reviewers opens up a can of worms, most reviews have clearly been dashed off, no print publication would ever publish them. We understand the transparency of a freely offered review, we can discern what sort of person wrote it and why.

Frequent reviewers could be offered minor discounts, but I think that anything beyond that gets into difficult territory. It is the old argument about mixing apples and oranges. If most reviews are freely offered opinions, and some have been paid for, can you trust any of them.

The upside for Amazon is that they have designed the site so that you will keep on getting offered something else to buy, or to look at, so that you are in effect bound to get something. You will never leave Amazon saying, I just didn't see anything I wanted.

In a few years there will probably be textbooks setting out all this stuff in turgid detail, until then we will just have to try and figure out for ourselves how the modern world works.

At time of writing I am
Amazon New Reviewer ranking 7104
Classic Reviewer ranking 44233
helpful votes 89% (39/44)
with 35 customer reviews