Slightly early for the end of Q3, but I wanted this to coincide with my Yelp anniversary, which I'm oddly unable to celebrate on the Yelp site itself...
There's no denying that as I mentioned earlier in the year, posting has fallen way off in this blog. Out of 97 total posts, including this one, 14 of them have been this year. In the first year of this blog, which started in September 2012, I clocked in with 21 posts. That amount will likely not be matched in all of this year. This blog will make it to 100 total posts before the year is out, as clean-up effort of my door sauces has yielded me some empty slots and I've still got a few new sauces on the shelf to work through, as well as the Best Sauce Of The Year year-end wrap-up post. 2015 will be when I look at finally hitting 100 sauces reviewed (I think). Currently, that total stands at 70. If I get really ambitious, I will do a statistical breakdown in the end of the year update with ratings, etc. There is no end in sight to the current pacing of posts here, though.
The wine blog, while drawing far, far less than this one, is much more regularly updated, with 1 less post than this blog has done in 2014 and almost all of it reviews. That one, however, has not had a full year, starting in March of this year. I try to maintain a fortnightly (post every two weeks) posting schedule there. Given that I have a pretty steady backlog, it will be 2016, if I write no more entries for it, before I run out of material and I have a fairly hefty backlog there, so that one will be in good shape for some time to come. As I don't currently spend column space in that blog writing updates as I'm doing here, any statistics, metrics and/or analytics will probably wind up appearing here, if at all. I may do something for the end of the year recap...if it picks up and there is demand, I may add more non-wine list entries as well.
Yesterday was also my one year anniversary of joining Yelp, which was almost a year (to the date) of when I started this blog (this one was oddly enough started on 09/11/12). Since Yelp has no blogging area, this blog will also get some commentary in that regard.
In that time on Yelp, I wrote 448 reviews and 54 updates, which is a total of 502 reviews, all told. Only 448 of those reviews and updates actually influence the given ratings for a business. Of those, I was "First To Review" 46 times (and in some cases, still the only to review) or slightly over 10% of the time. I also had 234 "Friends" (feel free to add me, if you wish), 3 "Fans", submitted 1 Event, which was one I'm enormously gratified to have been able to take part in (Inland/Outland from Svavar Jónatansson) and created 8 Lists. Rounding this out was 390 "Useful" votes, 104 "Cool" votes, 120 "Funny" votes and 28 Compliments. The review total in that 1 year span will not be duplicated in the next year cycle of my time on Yelp. Of the others, I have no idea, as most of them are not directly influenced by me.
My distribution of ratings falls in the order of: ~5% at 5 stars, ~34% at 4 stars, ~42% at 3 stars, ~16% at 2 stars and ~3% for 1 star. I'm not going to get into a discussion of the categories or cities represented, as some of that info is listed erroneously on Yelp and it would take me more time than I care to spend to correct it all. I will say that that distribution has statistically fallen more or less where I had anticipated when I started it, with the majority falling dead center or in the "Average" rating, with the next highest variances in the two categories next closest to that.
Now, I try to choose places I hope to enjoy (I really am hoping for at least a 4 star experience, most of the time), since I'm obviously spending money on this, so the ratings are skewed higher than they would be if I simply reviewed everything I encountered or likely would be if I was paid to review a bunch of random places. For instance, I tend away from reviewing most chains because I don't find it fair to them. Most fast-food places in my experience will only hit Average, comparatively, on a very, very good day for them and most of them do not have very, very good days. Only if something is extraordinary one way or the other will most chains wind up showing up in the review list. There are other reasons. I don't want to pad my totals nor have people have to wade through a bunch of shit to get to reviews for places interesting to them. It sucks when I have to do that; no way do I want to repeat that same bad tendency. There is also the location issue. If I review one Chili's out of say six in a city, but have been to them all (I haven't; this is just an example), it strikes me that if I'm going to get in that pool, it has to be more than just a foot and I simply don't care to write that many reviews, particularly for places I don't think are deserving of both my effort and general attention on that level. Let's face it; the Yelp reviews are definitely advertising of a sort.
My original mission was to utilize that site nearly exactly as I do this blog, which is more or less a running tally of the hot sauces I've tried, aggregated to include nearly all of them and as to which are worth me spending money on for repeat buys. I meant to apply that site more strictly to a database so I could increase my general restaurant knowledge and have it be useful to me when taking clients out to business lunches, but it has evolved somewhat to include additional information, including some categorization by me in the form of the Lists. The goal of having it be useful information of the sort I wanted when I tried to use Yelp on vacation a few times has not wavered at all. The year end post will be include updated information current as to the end of the year.
If there's anything anyone wants to see there, as here, send me a message and I'll try to get to it.
