Can you trust Kindle reviews?

Someone I follow on Twitter posted this earlier (sorry, I can’t remember who it was): a big list of people offering to post reviews of Kindle books for money.

I don’t recall hiring this guy:

For only 5 bucks I will buy your .99 Kindle ebook, provide a 1 star rating and write a negative review that may demotivate customers from buying your book. This will allow you as the author to help further alienate potential readers by taking the unfounded criticism way too personally. I may also click the “Yes” helful button on other negative reviews of your book to dramatically decrease your books credibility, sales and exposure.

Gags aside, I wonder how much work people like this get:

I will review up to TWO different products. I will give a 5-star positive review for your kindle, book or whatever product you have on Amazon. We all know Amazon is the number one outlet for people buying books, CDs, kindles etc and it is vital that customers see favourable reviews. My reviews will be tailored to match your product and will have a “genuine” feel to it and not appear spammy, such “cool book” or “nifty product, go and buy one” etc

I wrote a column about this kind of thing, but it hasn’t made its way online yet: if it’s worthwhile to game a system, the system will be gamed.

I know it’s illegal for companies to pay for this kind of thing. Does anybody know whether EU anti-astroturfing laws apply to individuals?

10,000 dangerous drivers

My brother David told me about this and I didn’t believe him: thousands of dangerous drivers should have been banned from driving, but haven’t. According to road safety pressure group Brake:

Brake and Direct Line analysed data provided by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) [1] and found that 10,072 drivers whose risky driving totted up 12 points or more have kept their licence and are still driving

The reason? They’ve used the “unnecessary hardship” defence, in some cases again and again. For example:

There are five drivers in Great Britain with 30 points on their licence. They are from Stoke-on-Trent, Northampton, Nottingham, Blackburn and Derby. These drivers have received points for driving uninsured, speeding, failing to give the identity of the driver, red light running and mobile phone offences. One of these drivers was caught speeding seven times, as well as driving uninsured and running a red light.

I’m all in favour of taking people’s circumstances into account when deciding how severely they should be punished, but surely the unnecessary hardship defence should be a one-time option followed by an instant ban and/or a custodial sentence if the person offends again? The laws aren’t there for a laugh; they’re there to ensure the safety of the rest of us.

Sky-high ticket prices: there’s no shortage of bad guys

Me, on Techradar:

Truly, these are wonderful times: never in human history have there been so many places to pay ridiculously inflated prices for tickets.

…is your favourite artist ripping you off?

Magic-powered joy machines

A wee column I wrote for PC Plus has made its way online:

Buying a PC online often feels like you’re playing the world’s worst text adventure. Do you want the new Argonomicon 15, or the Mongrolodian F2? Would you sacrifice a half-gig of RAM if it meant getting the F9321A processor instead of the F32321?

It’s all about specs.

Shouldn’t it be about sex?

I don’t mean sex in the horrible, local newspaper advert “SEX! AHAHAH MADE YOU LOOK! BUY A FRIDGE!” sense. I mean in the sense of possibility, of excitement, of the sheer joy of doing amazing things that make everyone think you’re amazing too.

Художник

Reviews: it’s the middle ones that matter

Whether you’re selling ebooks or giving away MP3s, designing T-shirts or creating iPhone apps, if you’re creating something for public consumption then sooner or later somebody’s going to criticise it.

How you feel about that will depend on the mood you’re in at the time, the way it’s expressed and the critic’s grip on reality — iOS app reviewers in particular often appear to come from different, more stupid planets — and even the nicest criticism can sometimes feel as if somebody’s ripped your heart from your chest and stomped on it as you stand there jetting blood – but it’s important to separate the reviews that matter from the ones that don’t.

As a rule of thumb, if the review’s at either end of the scale — if it’s one star out of five, or five stars out of five — then the review doesn’t matter. As nice as they are, five star reviews often mean that the reviewer knows you and likes you, or quite liked the thing you did and wanted to give you a big thumbs up. Similarly if it’s a one-star review, the reviewer may have decided in advance to hate what you’re doing, and only paid attention to it to confirm the initial prejudice and give you a good shoeing.

Sometimes — I’ve been guilty of this — the score is pushed in one direction or another because nobody reads or cares about two and a half star reviews, so you try and entertain with fulsome praise or a devastating slagging. I once wrote that Feeder were the best live band in Britain when what I really meant was that of all the British bands I’d seen that week, a list that began and ended with “Feeder”, Feeder were definitely the best.

The ones that do matter are the ones that say “but”. This looks good, but. The story is believable, but. The drum track is amazing, but. That’s criticism you can use. You might not agree with it — your response to it may well be “You BASTARD! How dare you suggest that my description of thirteenth-century dentistry was irrelevant to the wider narrative! I am AWESOME!” — but if you choose to pay attention to it, it can be a really big help.

I think you’ll find that I’m taking the piss

Me, taking the piss out of iPad 3 speculation that gets entire articles out of analysing an invitation:

If you look at the launch invitation the Calendar app icon is nice and clear and Retina-y, but just look at the Keynote icon to the right. It’s so blurry you can barely make it out.

It’s clear what Apple’s doing here: because its Retina display is so powerful and awesome and amazing, it probably uses quite a lot of battery power. Apple’s solution? Make the bits you aren’t looking at go blurry to save pixels. Thinking like this is why Android can never win.

In the comments:

so its not just out of focus, apple has invented a display that knows where you are looking?

Muppetry.

Battle of the book bots

Thanks very much to Mike, who sent me this one: it’s a really weird story about battling book pricing bots.

with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The internet has everything.

All dead Mormons are now gay

In response to some Mormons’ posthumous baptisms of people who weren’t actually Mormons, such as Anne Frank, somebody’s decided to fight back with playground humour. Alldeadmormonsarenowgay.com enables you to look up the names of dead Mormons and posthumously convert them to homosexuality.

I’m quite sure that’s offensive on about seventeen different levels, but it did make me laugh.

On torrents

Andy Ihnatko has published a great post about piracy. He’s no fan of the studios, as he makes clear in his post, but the idea that everybody who pirates is a freedom fighter is risible. Here’s part of an imaginary conversation about torrenting Game of Thrones:

What’s wrong, Scrumpkin?

Oh. You want it right now.

But — umm — the release date is only, like, two or three weeks away. Just hang on a bit. You’ll be fine.

Yes, I heard you (please, sir, there’s really no need to shout). I understand that you want it (and I hope I’m not misquoting you) right the ****ity-**** NOWWWWWWWW. But you can’t have it now. You can have it on March 6. It isn’t even as far away as you think. Remember? February is the super-short month?

(Sigh)

You’re already torrenting it, aren’t you?

Annnnd now you’re also calling me a d*** because I expected you to wait two weeks, and you’re claiming that you’re “forced” to torrent it because the video industry is bunch of turds.

I like Andy’s no-harm-done test – if you torrent it because you love it so much you can’t wait a single second longer to get it then you should buy it when it finally does come out; that way, there’s no harm done – but come on, if there’s an ideology behind piracy it’s usually “I want free stuff”.

10,000 copies of Coffin Dodgers

Somebody bought the 10,000th copy of Coffin Dodgers last night, and I thought I’d provide a breakdown of the numbers for those of you interested in the whole self-publishing thing. As you’ll see from the figures, it’s clear that giving copies away for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, except when it isn’t, and that it works exceptionally well, except when it doesn’t.

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