How would you organize reviews?

aciccarello

I'm considering adding reviews to my site. My main motivation is to collect things and places I would recommend to others. For example, a list of places nearby for people who visit my area. However, I'm not sure how I want to organize my reviews.

So far, posts on my site have been organized chronologically. Even recipes have been primarily sorted by publish date. I also have tags to categorize things. Currently tags are across all posts, but I'm wondering if I should separate tags of recipes from posts from reviews. Right now reviews of business are on my mind, but I might expand to movie reviews or other categories.

How would you like to post/read reviews?

How do you identify the subject of a review? (IMDB movie URL? GoodReads Book URL? ISIN? Address? Google Maps URLs?)
How do you identify a restaurant chain rather than a individual store?
What rating scales do you find useful? (1-5? whole/decimal numbers? thumbs up/down? letter grade?)
How would you like to consume reviews?
Should reviews (ever?) be in a (RSS/h-) feed?
How would you list related reviews (e.g. restaurants, or my region, or restaurants in my region)
Would back filling reviews from travels be useful to anyone? (e.g. TripAdvisor reviews?)
Would an archive of Amazon product reviews ever be useful?
Do publish dates matter on reviews?
h-review or h-entry?

jackydotwtf

Lots of good questions here; will answer some (with a context towards books):

How do you identify the subject of a review? (IMDB movie URL? GoodReads Book URL? ISIN? Address? Google Maps URLs?)

I'd use as many of them as I can but make human-visible a few that I'd like to more explicitly show. For example, if I'm reviewing a book, I'd opt to show links for OpenLibrary, WorldCat and maybe Bookshop. But I'd hide the ISBN-based URN and other places that I'd reference it (like on Goodreads or Wikipedia). That's mainly to help any consuming cases (as some sites provide more useful information for presenting things than others) and to highlight its availability (some forms of literature weren't cleanly digitized so I'd have to reference it by way of a Wikipedia article if not its WorldCat page).

How do you identify a restaurant chain rather than a individual store?

Frankly, this is why I'm in favor of fragment links (as I'd have one page for the franchise and use a #nyc1 to link to each place). But I'd most likely recycle the same URL and add location information specific to the local franchise as part of the reaction to it. For example, I'd have a page for Barnes and Nobles and with each reply, I'd add location information to highlight if I was at the one in Union Square, NYC or Union Square, SF.

Should reviews (ever?) be in a (RSS/h-) feed?

This is a good question. I'm in favor of them being in a feed because I'd want to be able to aggregate a feed of my own reviews for "discovery" purposes. It's also quite similar to what Bookwyrm enables as a review aggregator.

Would back filling reviews from travels be useful to anyone? (e.g. TripAdvisor reviews?)

Not necessarily unless I tied it to some sort of event (like reviewing Voodoo Donuts in Portland after attending IWC 2017).

benji

I've thought about this one a lot, specifically related to watch-of but same would generally apply to other post types.

I have a separate view for my watched posts but they also show up chronologically in my all feed which includes all public posts. My main feed is specific for articles, notes, and replies.

How do you identify the subject of a review? (IMDB movie URL? GoodReads Book URL? ISIN? Address? Google Maps URLs?)

This was my primary reason for building my micropub client sparkles. For movies I use OMDB which I then use to populate the h-cite info with:

{
  "name": [ "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope" ],
  "photo": [ "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTA5NjhiOTAtZWM0ZC00MWNhLThiMzEtZDFkOTk2OTU1ZDJkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTA4NDI1NTQx._V1_SX300.jpg" ],
  "uid": [ "imdb:tt0076759" ],
  "url": [ "https://imdb.com/title/tt0076759" ],
  "published": [ "1977" ]
}

For books I use OpenLibrary and use their ID format to link to them instead of using an ISBN. It also supports music and video games which point to last.fm and giantbomb.com respectively. All of these post types optionally support ratings in the client.

What rating scales do you find useful? (1-5? whole/decimal numbers? thumbs up/down? letter grade?)

I use 0.5 - 5 with half steps but thats mostly because that's what I started when migrating data from letterboxd. I've been wanting to make this configurable in sparkles but haven't yet. I find it useful regardless of whatever your scale is to have it defined somewhere in your site. I've been testing an emoji scale (😐, 🙂, 😀, 😍) but haven't added it publicly yet.

Should reviews (ever?) be in a (RSS/h-) feed?

The watched and all feeds also have their own separate RSS feeds but realistically I think I'm the only one using them. I think its a good idea because Letterboxd, Trakt, and Bookwyrm all have RSS feeds for user profiles and it would be nice to follow those directly even if the consuming case is still unclear.

How would you list related reviews (e.g. restaurants, or my region, or restaurants in my region)

I like the way that Sara handles it with dynamic filters for genre, year, ratings, etc. I currently only do this for grouping movies by rating (5 stars).

Do publish dates matter on reviews?

I asked about this a long time ago at a HWC and the approach that I ended up with is dt-published is the date I watched, read, etc. and dt-updated is the date the entry was posted.

h-review or h-entry?

I tried both. h-entry made more sense to me to be able to mark an watch-of with a rating. This way I could add review properties (rating, p-best, and p-worst) to any entry and the frontend could use that value to display things accordingly. This of course gets more complex the more things you add to the entry, for example:

"I listened to {BAND_NAME} play {POPULAR_SONG} at {LOCAL_VENUE} while drinking {PREFERRED_BEVERAGE} and rated it {RATING}".

Is the rating for the song, the band, the venue, the beverage, or the combined set of things? I would argue if you're making a single post for all that together then its for the experience, otherwise they would be separate posts but I think this is a personal preference thing.

I would definitely like to see more reviews posted regardless of whether its for movies, places, or products.

alex

I've also been thinking about this for my book reviews. So far this is what I've done:

Post Kind: Read (which isn't only for books)
Tag: book review (that one's only for, well, book reviews)
Usually I use the Storygraph metadata, because I'm lazy.

What I'm thinking of doing, soon enough:

Making a static page that has an index by theme, by author, by country, and by literary prize, so that people can browse in orders that aren't chronological
Replacing the Storygraph data with Wikidata, but that would probably mean creating the item for many of the books I'm reading. Technically I believe every book that's published should be allowed to have a wikidata item, which is cool, but they're not scraped automatically from anywhere. Inventaire.io does an amazing job for paper books, but for ebooks there is still no easy interface. That will probably be one of my first big coding projects, but it's still a big way out! In the meantime I'll probably manually create the Wikidata items.

I had also used Worldcat for a while at one point but it formatted the information a bit weirdly (for the Post Kinds scraper at least) and the OCLC API is paid (and extremely expensive) so I'd rather use an open database, even if it means more manual work.

I haven't checked OpenLibrary but it might be good!

Then:

For movies I link to OMDB
For music I link to wherever one can buy the music, preferably with a way to listen to it too, at least with a sample (I try not to link to streaming platforms like Youtube or Spotify)
For places I just put the GPS marker based on OpenStreetMap, but I feel like I should improve this.

aciccarello

Thanks everyone for the input. It was interesting to see how people approached this. I've officially posted my first review on my site!

https://www.ciccarello.me/posts/2024/04/19/pier-view-coffee/

Right now I don't have the reviews in my main feed because it's pretty experimental and I might add a bunch quickly. But in the future, I might including them in the main feed if they feel timely. I'm marking up my reviews as h-entry with the review-of being an h-card, though an h-product might make more sense if it's not a business. I'm still not sure how to handle a chain but jacky's idea of fragment URLs sounds interesting.

For organization, I plan on using specific tags. I might make some custom pages for specific topics that does some additional logic to organize reviews. For example, I might take "BestOfSanDiego" tagged reviews and group them into food vs activities, etc.

I still have work to do on the styling of the pages. There are also other options for metadata I might want to handle. I'd love to have maps handled semi-automatically, but I'm just using an iframe embed for now.