Fair Reviews

When I wrote my mini review of Clustrmaps I was directing my words to members of this group. One thing we have to remember when reviewing websites and programs here is that we do get read by many other people. The terms we use and mention are also searchable using Technorati.

Marc of Clustrmaps left comments in response to my post at Demo Junk and the one here. He addressed the comments I made and did it well. He also reminded me of an important point.

Finally, although your comments are more or less directed at your own 'interest group', once Technorati grabs em, the summary that appears to the world is pretty devastating ('boring', 'slow', 'junk'... from the name) and completely turns off potential users ... (hence my enthusiasm for setting the record straight) ;-)

I hesitate to 'reprimand' myself because I didn't mean any harm. The program didn't meet my expectations and I removed it from my blog. If I had written the review when I removed it from my blog I may have written the information I discussed with Marc in my test blog (who knew that name could be so devastating). But I didn't.

Most of my issues with the program were based on my changing expectations and my opinions formed around them. I liked the program enough to try it and used it for quite a while. Like other bloggers I used the excuse of slow browser loading to clean up my sidebar.

Many things can cause a blog to load slowly. As I write this I have another window open with The Demo Blog in it. The blog has been trying to load for about 5 minutes. One of the few sidebar items is holding things up. Until this item loads up I can't see the blog.

Any outside application can cause a blog to load slowly if it gets out of sync with the blog program. The more applications you have in a sidebar the more chances your blog will load slowly. You then have a choice: accept the situation or get rid of the nifty-but-unnecessary sidebar item.

One thing to learn from this experience is that we are not isolated. We may not agree with everybody but we can at least be fair.