Yelp!

So, first of all, before I talk about my thoughts on Yelp for Thing 19 of SPL's 27 Things program, I'll provide a little update from my most recent post wherein I was excited to discover that I could very easily publish to my blog directly from the Zoho Writer software. I thought this was just really cool so I mentioned my discovery to a co-worker. She was less than impressed. Eyebrows raised, looking at me like I'm dumb, scornful tone of voice: "you can do that in Word". Oh. So, I'm writing this post in Word. Cool.

Now, on to the exercise. I was supposed to take a look at one of the websites that had won an award for 2.0-ness on seomoz.org. I chose Yelp because, basically, I just really like Yelp. I think it is a fantastic tool for finding reviews from real people on any nature of organizations. I've used it many times to find good restaurants in cities I've visited where I didn't know a thing. For example, I love The Smok'n Pig BBQ in Valdosta, Georgia!

But, another real value of Yelp for us library folks is the ability afforded by this site to find out what our users are saying about us. Right now on Yelp, you can see several reviews for Sacramento Public Library. The guy who wrote this:

"This is a good public library. It's the main branch in downtown Sacramento. I once lost a book and owed $41 of fines. Once I found it and turned it in, they were nice enough to charge only $5 dollars for being so honest...it was a year plus overdue."

Gave us four stars! I guess because we were nice enough not to make him pay for a book that he had returned to us…