My View of Planet Dooyoo (Writing a Good dooyoo Review)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Writing a Good dooyoo Review
Date:	04/02/07 (306 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Make money, friends, improve your writing, other product reviews

Disadvantages: May not satisfy the more creative types

When you first start out on Dooyoo, the whole thing can be quite mystifying as to what it is you are doing exactly. I guess most folks start out simply wanting to write something somewhere under the pretense of being a writer. For most, it’s only after a while that you suddenly realise what Dooyoo is all about. Well, unless you avidly read all the terms and conditions and cotton on quicker than a pig in a truffle shop but most people aren’t that savvy or probably don’t like truffles. Yes, Dooyoo is a consumer opinion site. It exists so that “normal” people like me or you can look up an independent person’s view of something they have usually spent money on (for the most part) and read their opinion about the product. Was it good, bad or indifferent? How many stars out of 5 did they give it? Did they recommend it? How much did they spend? And so it continues. So, if you fancy buying the latest Guillemots CD or maybe a Nintendo game, if someone’s written about it on Dooyoo you should be able to look it up in the archive.

Dooyoo pays for people’s views. At 3p a read, it’s relatively generous compared to other sites and with £1.50 paid for rewarded reviews, classed as such because they have been awarded a crown, then investing time on Dooyoo can result in reasonable levels of remuneration although this money/Amazon vouchers or whatever won’t change your life! Dooyoo’s income stream is derived from visitors to the site buying through site links, using links that are part of affiliate schemes and selling data to organizations interested in the site content without compromising individual members' privacy. All this means that the site is as interested in visitors re-directed to reviews from search engines like Google as much as it is in individual members participating and possibly making purchases as a result of their active membership. Dooyoo baulks at paying for non-member reads as most experienced members will know but then the scenario above is still relatively generous although not on par with the halcyon days of the Internet bubble when the site first started some six years ago.

So how do you write a decent opinion? Well, there are plenty of threads that will take you to a “How to write a good xxxx review” depending on which category it is you are interested in. I’ve even written a few of these myself although only when I’ve taken on the mantle of category guide as a way of indicating the kind(s) of things I look for in a decent opinion and what might constitute a recommendation for a crown. Interestingly, Dooyoo perseveres with its guide set up whereby unpaid helpers actively read, rate and recommend for crowns those opinions that fall into their category. For those interested in such a role, contact Dooyoo via the links on the Community Page. The “How To” reviews should help although they can become out of date and different guides may look for different things.

And so to point 2: ask a guide. Even if a guide is unpaid, they are there to help and it doesn’t hurt to ask for pointers on how to improve on review writing. I’ve spoken to a number of guides offline over the years and they’ve been overwhelmingly helpful. They are appointed because of the high standard of their own work (usually) and will be a able to answer queries about most aspects of Dooyoo. With the messaging system in place on Dooyoo now, it’s never been easier to talk to a guide (unless they’ve used the “block” facility with you!).

At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, reviews should have a beginning, a middle and an ending. I know it’s basic stuff but…erm….you’d be surprised *rolls eyes*. The review should be about the subject that you actually want to write about (e.g. a review about a BMW car should be about a BMW car and not a Citroen). The review doesn’t have to go on ad nauseum to be a good review. Most reviews will be somewhere between 800 and 1300 words long and no more although it’s not an exact science and it’s up to you how much you include. Extraneous stuff will frustrate some readers and classic examples are including copious detail about a company history, an author’s life and times and other background that doesn’t necessarily add to the quality of the review. The “kitchen sink” approach is often a desperate attempt to gain nominations from other members for a crown and we’ve all been there at some time or other. A few lines about Stephen King’s writing career to date or a short paragraph about the history of Dover Castle to set the scene are fine and dandy as long as the bulk of the review is your own version of how you got on with the product, place or thing.

One of the benefits of the site is that not everything is consumer driven. Some of the very best reviews appear in Speaker’s Corner/Discussion and will be about all kinds of things. Everything from “Climate Change” to “Brown Britain”, “Refereeing in Football” to “Top 10 Movie Scenes” can be a welcome break from all of those product reviews and provides an opportunity to be more expansive in writing style whilst staying on the subject. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t put your own stamp on the way you write reviews anyway and the comments below regarding writing style expands on this a little further.

Like any written work, spelling and punctuation are important. There’s nothing worse than mis-spelling words like “indefinitely” (aaaaaargh) or not using paragraphs when writing a review. It’s inconceivable that people don’t use spell checkers these days but even spell checkers aren’t foolproof and if a word has more than one interpretation (as many do) then you may find that your wander or wonder may not be what you meant. A tip for newer writers/members may even be to read a few reviews to gauge the standard of writing along with punctuation and grammar before actually posting for the first time. In hindsight, I wish I had done that on the first product review site that I joined i.e. Ciao and the hail of criticism for my opinion about the movie "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" (quick spell check for the word "philosopher") still cuts like a knife today. Actually, I'm lying and it doesn't but it could have been a lot better back then by reading around first.

Everyone has their own style. I like Jeremy Clarkson’s writing style even if he regularly breaks the rules of correct grammar but that doesn’t mean that everyone likes him (I like him even though he once said that my beloved Birmingham was like the dirt ring on the inside of a bath a very grimy man has just got out of....grrrrrrr). The rating and comment system on Dooyoo is an open invitation for feedback whether good or bad. Personally, I welcome feedback and realized a long time ago that worrying about individual ratings was pure folly. The idea behind the rating system is that everyone has the right to exercise their own personal rating of a review according to how useful they felt it was and that’s perfectly OK. Lots and lots of ratings made all the same way makes the system redundant if there is no variation in ratings and if you study Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), one of the central tenets is that “There is no such thing as failure; only feedback”. If you stop and think about this statement it is incredibly powerful and will help people evaluate events in their life as well as taking an objective view when participating in sites like Dooyoo.

Ho hum, there you have it: my view of writing reviews for Dooyoo. I’m over 1300 words and don’t want to outstay my welcome, what with all those other opinions about beauty products and the latest movies awaiting your perusal. I sincerely hope that this made sense to most although I appreciate that it will probably not to some (noted from the SU ratings *sigh*) but at the end of the day (cliché, I know) it’s all about informing other people, enjoying writing and enjoying the benefits that come with an active membership of a site that is very much alive. I certainly enjoy it and I hope you will/do to.

Thanks for reading

Mara

Summary: Planet Dooyoo according to Mara