Leadership and Executive Development for women of all races, cultures and backgrounds
Issue link: https://diversitywoman.epubxp.com/i/510478
d i v e r s i t y w o m a n . c o m S u m m e r 2 0 1 5 D I V E R S I T Y W O M A N 39 DW Life > By Br ittany Shoot J enny Korn is serious about Tai food. A scholar of online identity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Korn is Tai American and regularly uses crowdsourced sites like Yelp and Trip- Advisor to fnd hidden gems. But she doesn't tend to care about the metrics on which most casual users rely. "I don't look at Yelp's or TripAdvisor's number of stars or even number of re- views, but I do examine the qualitative data," she says. "Tose comments mean more to me because people took the time to put their experience into words, not just a mere click on a number." She looks for words and phrases that are person- ally meaningful in order to fnd what she craves. Recently, seeking a Tai restaurant in rural Wisconsin, she happened upon a description of a café whose owners were also the cooks. It stood out to her as an au- thentic spot worth the drive from her Chi- cago home. Te qualitative data led her to a spot that did not disappoint. Here comes everybody Korn's ability to fnd an authentic Tai restaurant in a remote location wouldn't have been possible 15 years prior. Two decades ago, crowdsourced—also called user-generated—review sites were still incubating. Tey were mostly just wishful ideas without fully formed business plans to back them up. Household services subscription site Angie's List went live in May of 1999 and went fully interactive in 2000. Tat same year, TripAdvisor launched its free travel review service, funded by advertising. To- day, 125 new re- views are posted per minute on TripAdvi- sor, which has more than 200 million in total. Yelp launched its free restaurant and business listing review database in the fall of 2004. Ten years later, Yelp was re- ceiving 135 million monthly visitors, in 20 countries and 15 languages. By 2006, Time magazine had named you, the user contributing knowledge to the World Wide Web, its Person of the Year. Today, user ratings and reviews are not just good (or in some cases not so good) for business—they are expected and essential. As a result, TripAdvisor is one of the largest travel sites on the Web, with more than 30 subsidiary sites like SeatMe and GateGuru. Now a mul- tinational corporation, Yelp became a publicly traded company in early 2012. Angie's List has been publicly traded since 2011. Some sites that rely solely on user-contributed content, like Wiki- travel, remain free and do not even em- ploy site managers or administrators. Money Matters Coming from the crowd Navigate the world of user-generated review sites THINKSTOCKPHOTOS