Top Marks for Trying (Updated) (u-rate-it.com)

Member Name: zebra

Product:	u-rate-it.com
Date:	04/02/03 (127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No pop ups, ad your own items,, excellent support, excellent member facilities

Disadvantages: little chance of earning, no original reviews

U-rate-it is the latest UK opinion site to emerge. It operates in much the same way as other opinion sites and has its own advantages and disadvantages over these.

Members

If you have registered you can be permanently logged in to URI if you wish. If you are logged in you will find member facilities at the top left hand side of the page. The facilities provided for members are excellent. There is a guest book and private messaging facilities. You can choose to be informed by email when a comment is posted on a review, or when you get private or personal messages. You can add people to your 'buddy' list and through this know which of your friends are online and be informed when people write a new review. The members box also has links to the member list, the forums, community page and message box

Message Box

The message box was very busy when it first opened and is used mainly in the evening for the usual inane chat that message boards seem to attract. However James clearly intends to have a regular open meeting to discuss the site. There was one last week which lasted for about an hour but was only attended by about 4 or 5 people.

Marketplace

The market place is another member facility which allows you to advertise items for sale free. But since its introduction only three adverts have been placed.

Forum

There is a forum to discuss topics relevant to categories. This is rarely used at the moment.

On the right hand side of the home page are several more yellow boxes.

Users online - shows the number of members and number of guests online.

News - there is usually something new in the news box and things change almost daily on URI. Currently the news regards the latest draw and quill winners and a new feature suggested - a web log, whatever that is. Members can vote if they would like this new feature in the poll box further down the page.

There is a box

with the names of four guides James, the owner and main support, Angelus, offy and alliecat and an indication whether they are on or offline. There are lots of other category guides too but they are tucked away on the relevant category pages. You will find many more familiar names.

There are boxes showing the members with the most tokens accumulated in the current month, another box with the latest members and another with the latest items added.

The main part of the page gives a run down of what's new at URI. At the moment this includes the shopping mall, which is basically just a collection of banner links organised under relevant topics. On my computer it's a bit slow to load and I doubt whether I will visit it again unless there was some incentive to do so.

Finally we get to the reviews. The ten latest reviews are shown on the main page and then you can view the next ten.

At the moment I would estimate that well over 90% of the reviews posted have already appeared on other opinion sites. So if you read regularly at other sites you will invariably not find anything original at URI. This is one of the main disadvantages to the site. Those who already have a good collection of reviews on other sites can gradually post them onto URI and without much effort earn lots of tokens to be entered in the monthly draw.

Rewards

There are several ways of getting paid at URI: You can earn tokens which are entered monthly into a prize draw, certain reviews can earn 1p per rating to get vouchers, and if you are a brilliant writer you could win a £30 Amazon voucher.

The monthly draw

You earn tokens by rating and commenting on reviews and by adding new categories and items. You also earn tokens by having your reviews rated by other people. Finally you may also be lucky enough to get a golden quill and if you do you will get an extra 30 tokens for that.

The accumulated tokens go into a r
andom
draw. This month the prizes were a wooden gift, a £10 and £20 Amazon gift certificate. It might be expected that those with the most tokens would win but I think one of the winners only had about 50 tokens against those in the top ten list who had thousands. So being in the top ten does not necessarily give a greater advantage.

Tokens earned from DVD reviews go into a special draw to win 2 x one months membership at movie match to hire DVDs.

Payment

For a few categories Gift vouchers can also be earned. These categories are DVDs, DVD players, CDs, MP3 players, and console Games. The payment is 1p for every very useful or useful rating you receive from members and when this amounts to £10 you can claim a gift voucher to use in leading online stores.

The Best Review of the Month award

As on other opinion sites you can nominate the best reviews for recognition. URI has adopted the now famous golden quill award. Each week URI and the category guides select from the nominations reviews which deserve the award. A Golden Quill is worth 30 tokens but it also gives you a chance of the top award on the site. Each month the best review will earn a £30 Amazon voucher.

My Opinion

I have read a lot of reviews praising URI and indeed it certainly has a lot going for it. James puts a great deal into the site and couldn't be faulted for support. Overall it has better facilities for the members than the other sites and I have no doubt that more will be added. I know I will probably get lots of comments disagreeing with me on this but I think most people are just using the site to hopefully line their pockets in some way and don?t really care about the future of URI that much.

The paying categories only pay 1p and if you get 10 reads per review it will take 100 reviews to earn a £10 voucher and not everyone writes in the paying categories. The quill award for the best review will obviously go to the
best writers
so there's not much chance of winning that for most of us. That award will always go to the multi -crown and diamond people. So that leaves the draw and I don?t think that will continue to attract the present numbers of reviews when there is only a tiny chance of winning one of three prizes.

Now I know that we all would prefer it if we got paid loads of money for writing reviews but the glorious days are over. I know most people post on as many sites as they can and who can blame them? But at the moment URI hasn't got anything original on it at all and to be honest that makes it rather boring. I know that a few people have put up original reviews but that is mainly because dooyoo is so slow to do so and one of the main advantages of URI is the fact you can write about anything you like and if necessary add your own category instantly.

However, the wonderful advantage of being able to add categories and items will, I suspect, be a huge disadvantage to the site in the long run. There is no standard way of adding items so books or CDs for example may be listed by title, author etc. in any order. The items in a category are listed alphabetically and the search facility only picks up the first word. I know there are two books by Andrew Harvey listed but the search cannot find them because the books have been listed under titles. This probably means that many items will be duplicated because it is easier to add an item than look for it. The categories are already in a bit of a mess and it will surely get worse. Another problem is that some people have obviously decided to earn tokens by adding categories and items and in food and drink, for example, a category for vegetables has I assume every vegetable from asparagus to Zuccini.

There has been much talk of the wonderful community but I can?t really see it in action. There are often up to 15 members on the site but they are not chatting in the forums, not using the ma
rketplace, nor chatting in
the meetingbox nor are they rating much either. I suspect that URI is used much the same as everywhere else - you have a favourite opinion site where you hang out and on the other sites you just rate your buddies - it doesn't take long because you have already read the reviews anyway.

Only a few people bother to vote and so give feedback on relevant site issues. Less than a handful turned up for the first URI chat session. This rather suggests that people are not that interested doesn't it? The usual internal 'politics' are as evident on this site as on others and at least one guide has already resigned.

So far what I have said has been almost entirely negative but that is how I see it. I think URI could become a great site but only if more people are willing to help it become so. The only way this will happen is if people are prepared to really invest in it not just take. I think James is in a very tricky position at the moment he wants to keep the members happy but at the same time wants the site to grow. The majority of members will only be happy if the site remains as they want it - namely the freedom to cut and paste from other sites, not write anything unique, just rate and nominate buddies and get paid in some form or another .


Well I did say that James is responsive but I think the latest newsletter shows just how much. The messy category problem is being addressed and new awards are being introduced.

***From the URI Newsletter 8th February***

What's been happening?

It's been a quiet week with only a few new visible improvements being
added to the site. There are a few new graphics and logos which help to
improve site navigation. We've also resolved a few incompatibility errors
with the Opera browser.

Category/Item reorganisation

However, we have been making a number of
'behind-the scenes'
improvements including investing time in deciding how best to organise the
categories and items. So far we've worked on the Website category and
The Soapbox. We will soon be tidying up the CDs, books and film
categories. We will also be adding additional guidelines on how to
organise categories and items.

Award Schemes

In light of feedback from our users, we are going to be revising the current
award schemes. In addition to making a couple of changes to the Golden
Quill Award, we are adding three new award schemes to compliment the
Golden Quill Award Scheme.

Currently, the Golden Quill Award Scheme is awarded for very high quality
reviews. Due to its nature, it is likely to be won by established writers a
majority of the time. In order to be able to give newer or less experienced
writers a chance of winning, we are going to introduce a New Writers
Award. The Award will recognise new writers that have been u-rate-it
members for a short time.

At u-rate-it, we believe that there's often a difference between a well written
'review' and one that's useful. For example, there are a number of
submissions containing poetry and pose which of excellent quality and
deserving of a Golden Quill but will not help you to chose a product,
website or service. In light of this, we'll be introducing the Great 'Product
Review' Award. In order to level the playing field a little, we'll suggest a
product type for each award.


Finally, we'll be introducing a regular write-off competition on a selected
topic.

The new award schemes will start next week. In order to be able to
manage each of the schemes, we shall be changing the schedule of the
award presentations. Further details will be announced early next week.

Summary: