Today marks the release of VodkaBuzz 2.0. It’s been just over a year since I launched VodkaBuzz, and two things have become clear to me.
- This site is providing something valuable that people are interested in.
- Things can’t keep going the way they have been for the past year.
VodkaBuzz’s Value
When I started VodkaBuzz, I had a few goals for it from a business perspective and a few goals from a vodka enthusiast perspective.
Obviously, monetizing the site with ads was a long term goal. Less obvious was making contacts within the vodka industry. No other site I’ve written did well with ads because the content was pretty geeky web design stuff that didn’t lead to a lot of interest. In order to monetize, you have to have something interesting. Furthermore, I knew making contacts would come if / when VodkaBuzz gathered the interest of people. I decided to put off the business goals for the better part of the first year and simply concentrate on being a vodka enthusiast.
My goal as an enthusiast was to make a site that is useful to other vodka drinkers, as well as share my opinions and involve my friends in my interests. If I could get my friends excited about vodka and being involved in VodkaBuzz, people I didn’t know would probably get excited and interested as well.
So, I created a very simple site with a single goal: weekly vodka ratings and reviews. For just over a year, I’ve done pretty much that. In fact, as of this writing, I’m about 6 reviews shy of a one per week average. Sticking to this formula has done well. I get tons of e-mails from people all over writing to suggest vodkas or tell me how VodkaBuzz influenced their purchases. Even my mom gets excited and donates bottles to the review process. VodkaBuzz has exceeded my expectations. It’s been a lot of fun and I appreciate everyone who has joined me in creating a great site (especially you who read the site on a regular basis).
VodkaBuzz Has to Change
Over the past year, I’ve realized some deficiencies in the setup. First of all, I can’t legitimately keep up the pace indefinitely without potentially facing some health issues. Second, it’s nice to drink old favorites sometimes without worrying about the next review, which is rare for me now. Third, there are some supply issues with my location (e.g. a rather limited number of vodkas are available for purchase in Alabama) that are preventing me from, say, actually reviewing suggestions I receive via e-mail in a decent amount of time. Fourth, there is a strong case for community but not much in the way of supporting a community. The first three seem like obvious issues and solving the fourth issue helps alleviate the rest.
So, I should try to cultivate the community. Initially, when I launched comments, the goal was to foster the community and get people involved in a conversation. Due to a half-baked solution in tandem with moving servers and other technical challenges, the discussion aspect of the site hasn’t been as fulfilling as I’d like. I’ve had quite a few good e-mail conversations, but I’d like discussions to be open to the community. The first version of the site, as much as people like the look-n-feel, isn’t extensible enough to accommodate the changes I feel will improve the community aspect. So, I started working on VodkaBuzz 2.0.
Where VodkaBuzz is Heading
If you only like reading vodka reviews and don’t care about getting involved with other enthusiasts, not much will change for you. I’m still going to do weekly reviews in the near term. The only difference is that I’ve introduced this blog, which shows up in the RSS feed along with reviews. In the long term, I’m planning to feature the best user reviews, which may show up in the main feed, to help alleviate the first three issues noted above. I haven’t implemented user reviews yet. So, things will probably be the same for you for awhile.
If you are interested in helping me create a community for vodka lovers, here is where things get interesting. VodkaBuzz 2.0 is a ground-up rewrite. I’ve put a lot of effort in laying the groundwork for the future. As they say in the Web 2.0 world, release early and often. I’m taking that to heart. So, the site you see now should be seen as groundwork. There is more to come.
I’ve implemented the standard sort of user login and profile that can be expected in today’s Internet. I’ve tied that in with the commenting system to help things function more like they ought to (instead of the not-quite-there solution from the first iteration of the site). I’ve improved the user rating system to give users an easier way of saying how they felt about a vodka without going through the hassle of posting a comment (or eventually a review of the vodka). I also opened up posting prices to the community. If you have a VodkaBuzz account, you can post a price you found in your city, which gets filtered into the average price and the price by city (which has a nice Google Map to help you locate your place in the US). Finally, to help improve the commenting system (and hopefully provide more and better discussion), I added an “e-mail me when someone replies to me” option so you don’t have to manually watch a page to see when someone says something back to you.
In the not-too-distant future, I plan to implement full user reviews. Users will be able to add vodkas to the site and post a review of the vodka. I’ll then be able to post and plan my reviews around what vodkas people are most interested in. Additionally, user forums, personal messages through the site, and more will be added on to allow more interaction. Hopefully in another year or so, we’ll be doing meet ups. If you have any feature suggestions to help cultivate the site, feel free to let me know. If it’s something I can do that will add more value to the site, I’ll certainly give it fair consideration.
The new version is not without losses. The big loss for me is the scaled ranking system. When I launched the site, I wanted to make recommendations the way I do it in real life. That is, I usually say, “Y is better than X but worse than Z.” This ranking system, I think, was a unique way of doing things. Over the year, though, it became difficult to keep this ranking system. When I started, I had a pretty good grasp of where things fit in the list because there weren’t many vodkas in the list. Now, however, there are vodkas that I have had one time, potentially a year ago. It’s difficult to accurately place a vodka relative to some of the vodkas I’ve only had once. So, VodkaBuzz is moving to the same sort of star rating system most sites use (except our stars are shot glasses).
As a consequence of this, any list-based thing on the site can’t really work. Instead of a dynamic top 5 vodkas or best vodka list, I’ll compile the list at the end of the year for a best of the year list. The Top 10 Vodkas Widget had to be frozen (and will eventually be redone). So, some things had to suffer or change, but these pains are necessary to move the site toward the future.
That’s That
So, welcome to VodkaBuzz 2.0. Keep an eye out for new features as we release them. If you find any bugs, don’t hesitate to let me know. Likewise, if you have any feature requests, questions, comments, etc., post them below. Thanks again for reading, participating, and enjoying VodkaBuzz. The site wouldn’t be what it is without you!
Rich
Let me first say I’ve been away from the site for a bit and was surprised and pleased by the redesign, I like the idea of the community features. It is somewhat unfortunate you had to do away with your previous ranking system. The 5 star system while commonly used tends to fall prey to the most popular or widely known things, i.e. if many of the users ranking have had Smirnoff and vodkas that weren’t as good as Smirnoff but have never tried anything better it’s entirely likely that a large amount of people will rate Smirnoff as 5 star. It may be difficult statistically to prevent something like this from catapulting the widely known brands straight to the top of the list at the expense of lesser known ones, then again my major is computer science and not mathematics. ;)
What about keeping some elements of your previous system? Obviously as you said trying to figure out where exactly on a ladder of tens to hundreds of brands a vodka belongs becomes near impossible. But perhaps you could combine a small element of the old system with the 5 star ratings. If you can come up with say 3 decently known vodkas, one lower range quality-wise, one mid-range, and one high-range. The selection would then be number of stars and where it fits in on a ladder of those vodkas, three would give 4 choices (below the lowest, between lowest and middle, between middle and highest, above highest). It would be more technically difficult to implement but might result in more accurate ratings? Just food for thought.
P.S. Sorry I didn’t reply to your email last month, I meant to and got busy and forgot. I was impressed that you replied to my comment about Ciroc, it’s very rare to actually get a response from someone who runs the site most places I’ve been.
Rich
Ok I wrote that before I went to look at the new Vodka reviews. I for some reason was thinking of one overall rating and I see you have it separated into your rating, bang for the buck, and user rating. If you did like the idea about where it ranks on a range of a few known vodkas that would actually be much easier the way you have it set up as you could add a field that you set once when you write the reviews (or when you start doing user reviews that the user writing it would set).
I’ve also thought of another feature, an edit button on the comments ;)
Robert
@Rich, I definitely get what you mean. I was worried about Grey Goose getting far better user ratings than I gave it, but it seems like most people that end up leaving comments or sending me email are above average as far as vodka is concerned. So, I’m not worried as much now. When I get user reviews running, I may do some kind of guide to associate, for example, a 3 rating to Stoli. I want to give folks as much flexibility as possible, though. So, if they think Stoli is a 5, they shouldn’t be denied that. Eventually, to help find the best user reviews, I might add user review ratings. So, a bad review could get filtered out if quite a few of you guys rate it down. But that’s a ways off.
I’m writing this on my iPhone, which is proving difficult. Need to get the iPhone version of the site back up. I may have more to say later when I can easily read the points you made while replying to them.
Robert
Oh, yeah. Edit comments. I thought about that, but decided against it for two reasons: 1) Not many other commenting systems do comments editing, and I wanted to implement something familiar. 2) It always bugged me when I was using forums like VBulletin that people could go back and completely alter their reply at any time, giving a huge potential for shenanigans.
As far as keeping an accurate timeline, replying to yourself with corrections or further explanation gets the job done. I have the potential for threaded comments. If the single thread gets confusing, I may implement the visual threads. For now, I’m just trying to keep things visually simple.
Rich
Makes sense, hadn’t given much thought to all the fun things people try to pull when they can edit their posts. I’m a moderator on an automotive forum running VBulletin so I’ve seen what you’re talking about many times.
Sounds like the ratings are working well then which is awesome. I noticed you have a field on each vodka review for cap type, not really necessary but might be interesting to add whether the bottle is glass or plastic too. I know on the Sobieski review you mentioned the metal cap being of better quality than Smirnoff’s which leads me to believe it came in a glass bottle for you. Interestingly enough around here it is only sold in plastic bottles with a plastic cap that I’ve seen. I thought it was kind of funny to use a different bottle for different states.
Robert
@Rich, that’s interesting yours only comes in plastic. Around here, whether you get plastic or glass is a probability based on size and price. The cheaper and larger the bottle, the more likely the bottle will be plastic. There are instances where a 750 of a vodka will be glass and the 1.75 liter will be plastic. Whatever the case, I run into the same problem I did with UPCs. I was recording the UPC, but that is specific to the size of the bottle (that is, a 750 will have a different UPC than a 1.75). While it was an interesting stat to have, I’d have to record every one for it to be really useful. So, I dropped it to simplify things. It looks like I’d have a similar problem with bottle type, especially since we have some evidence that bottle types vary by region. That unfortunately has implications on cap type. I’ll have to have a think on it.
vodkafan
http://vodkabuzz.com/vodkas/?view=bang_for_the_buck&sort=DESC
bang for the buck on the older one, with the % showed tito’s at 100%, so it should be 1st on the list, on the new one its got 5 shot glasses for everything
the new one sorts with 360, rain and blavod all above it, and i don’t think any of them have been rated as high… and many have not quite as many shot glasses
Robert
@vodkafan, As I said in the post, I unfortunately had to change the way ratings are done. I couldn’t continue to legitimately rank the vodkas on an absolute scale since, a year in, I can’t remember what some of the older vodkas taste like. For example, I’d be lying if I told you Smirnoff was better or worse than 5 Vodka. I’ve had 5 Vodka one time in March 2008. I don’t remember specifics about the flavor, mouth feel, etc. So, I moved to a 0-5 ranking. This allows me to rate without directly comparing the vodka to each individual vodka. Instead, I can compare it to a group of vodkas (e.g. all three ranked vodkas), which increases the likelihood that I’m familiar with a vodka in the group and allows a little more accuracy.
Additionally, the Bang for the Buck and Quality ratings (and user ratings) are independent of one another (and always have been) since I might feel a $5 vodka with a 3 rating offers more for the money than a $20 vodka with a 5 rating (or vice versa). So, quality doesn’t necessarily reflect bang for the buck, though it can. I’ve toyed with the idea of making Bang for the Buck generate dynamically by looking at average price, percent alcohol, quality rating, and user rating, but I need more community involvement collecting prices and adding user ratings before that would be viable.
Right now, when you sort the vodka list I only use one parameter (e.g. quality, bang for the buck, name, published date) to sort and let the database choose how to sort “tied” vodkas (that is, vodkas that have the same quality or bang for the buck). The question, then, is should I add a second sort parameter to deal with “tied” vodkas? If so, what should it be? My preference is to sort “tied” vodkas alphabetically, but you might find it more intuitive to sort “tied” vodkas by quality.
I’m open to letting the community decide. What do you think is most intuitive? I’ll ask other VodkaBuzz folks and tally that with any responses here and implement the most viable popular opinion.
Thanks for your input!
Robert
@vodkafan, What isn’t sorting properly? If you have a link to a page where you think the sorting is wrong, I’ll try to fix it, but everything looks good on my end.
vodkafan
Dislike it… Bang for the Buck is not sorting properly