Judge Spot

Unlike site jabber, this website publishes biased reviews of websites.

ÉAfter posting a poem, I get couple of responses from the writers of the poems I am forced to review. So that rule seems to work, however, I think that this rule Iis self defeating inasmuch as comments are often
Mundane, like "nice" "keep writing" etc.
This type of comment makes it look as if the poem was not read to be enjoyed, but was rather scanned to satisfy the rule.
I would like to see more poets read my work
Otherwise why post it. Is there some way to cycle the older works?

SiteJabber's direct competitor, or clearly intended to be; it has only been around for a year as yet, but it's not hard to see the influences.

Let's take a closer look at the quality of information here, which includes Alexa ratings. And let's compare what judgespot.com says about itself, compared to what it tells us about SiteJabber.

According to judgespot, it's number 15,475 in the world while Sitejabber trails at number 20,853 in the world, in the Alexa ratings. True? No. Alexa puts judgespot at 21,231 and SiteJabber at 19,503.

According to judgespot, it gets 64,621 page views per day. SiteJabber manages only 47,955 a day. True? No. At least, not according to Google Ad Planner, considered one of the most accurate sources of web traffic information.

Google shows judgespot as getting around 510k page views per year, which equates to 42,500 a month - close enough to the figure that judgespot claims for SiteJabber. However, SiteJabber comes in at 1.1 million page views, around twice as many as judgespot and twice what judgespot claims for SiteJabber.

Perhaps the most important statistic is the ranking of both sites in the USA, the biggest market for review sites at the moment, given that most sites being reviewed are going to be selling into the USA. In this case, Alexa tells us that it ranks judgespot at number 20,478 in the USA, with SiteJabber streets ahead at number 7,054.

Now I understand that these are all just numbers, and that they are estimates at best, and that nobody takes statistics very seriously because they can be made to say anything we like. Which is fair enough. However, judgespot chooses to offer these figures as part of its review content, and as far as I'm concerned, it's fair game for criticism if the numbers it is providing aren't accurate or are misleading.

One thing you can't miss about judgespot is the sheer volume of data it makes available for every site. Not only sourcing from Alexa, but also offering WHOIS data about domain registrations and providing the content of any recent and relevant tweets on Twitter. And all this is interesting stuff, and in the current fashion of aggregating disparate data into one venue. But I wonder how many visitors are really going to be interested in all this, when what they're looking for is consumer reviews? I suspect, although there's fascinating data here, the majority of visitors are going to look right through it. If the site offered all this information as an option, via a drop-down or pop-up window, or a lightbox screen, I feel it would become what it ought to be - subsidiary to the reviews, which is what most visitors are going to want to see. And I wouldn't mind a similar scheme here on sitejabber, either, as long as it was kept in its place.

A controversial aspect of this site is that it uses the services of another site called urlinspector.com, which rates sites as "family-friendly" or not. So if you want to see information about a site that urlinspector.com regards as not "family-friendly", you won't. All you'll get is a message telling you that only "family-friendly" sites are reviewed here.

I can see the thinking, but, and this is just my personal opinion, I don't like it. I don't like censorship, and I don't like someone setting themselves up as a self-appointed arbiter of what is, or is not, appropriate for me or my family to see or do or say. For once I'm not going to be in the least objective about this one - I wouldn't use this site myself, because of this factor alone. Actually, having been censored once by SiteJabber as well, I'm only still here because I care enough about the project. Otherwise I'd have already moved on.

However, as far as I know, the combination of Alexa and WHOIS and Twitter data alongside reviews is an unique idea so far and deserves a chance to prove its usefulness to visitors, or not. The site hasn't been around long enough to mature yet, and if it survives I would expect there to be many design and content changes over the next couple of years - as we have seen with SiteJabber, too. But whether there's room for yet another consumer reviews site, is another question, and in the end I think that alone will decide whether this one succeeds or not.