Five Standard Deviations: reviews

Showing posts with label reviews. Show all posts

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Yelp == Mafia?

I'm a pretty big user of yelp.com, and there have always been concerns about competitor restaurants writing bad reviews. But accusations of extortion --oh my!

What is this?

A friend of mine once told me I was "five standard deviations from the mean [1]." That might have been a put-down to some, but it filled me with glee. I get a perverse sense of validation from being unique.

But being unique also poses some problems. It means that most products are not made with your priorities in mind. It means more work on your part to find the goods and services that are right for you.

That's where this blog comes in. I am hoping that there are a few people out there can identify with my weirdness and benefit from my findings.

[1] Roughly speaking, this means being more different from average/normal than 99.99994267% of all people.