Re restaurants you visit, I’m impressed that you pay for them yourself, and don’t think of yourself as an entitled blogger who should be woed by restaurateurs and p.r. people. That is certainly a stereotype, but I’m afraid people like that exist.

Re reviews, what I like about them is that they discuss the pros and cons. If you never discuss the cons, your blog reads like a promotional tool to boost restaurant and event attendance. Bloggers are not p.r. people, but sometimes it sure seems that way.

On the subject of blogs, I sometimes write about restaurants I visit and tell about my experience. I don’t portray myself as a critic because I’m not and that’s not the area of food writing I would like to get into. I think my readers know that and my hope is that they’ll see my restaurant write-ups as if I were their friend telling them about a place I just tried. Unfortunately, It seems like all bloggers who write about restaurants in any fashion are always placed into the same category with those who take or demand freebies. I have paid for the majority of my meals; I never announce myself and I don’t request special favors. On maybe two or three occasions in my three years of blogging I’ve been to pre-opening media dinners and if I have written about them, I specify that they were.

Yes, good to have some skepticism when it comes to these sites. We’ll all have to have lots now when we read Yelp.

Agreed that the site is pretty good in many ways, but they’ve ruined it now. I wouldn’t call it a high-school manner. More like the mafia, where you have to pay protection money to keep your business in good standing.

Freelance reviewers may not work as well in those terms, but usually they are a necessary evil because the publication/website can’t afford salaried employees.

If you can find smaller newspapers and local websites that take reviews or need them, you can still get into restaurant reviewing.

Also as I wrote to Jake, Will Write for Food has a 9,000 word chapter on restaurant reviewing. Sorry for the blatant self-promotion, but at least it’s an inexpensive investment.

One difference between a site like Yelp and other social networking sites like Facebook or other user review sites like Amazon is that people who are really into Yelp are pretty cultish about it. They will rush to defend Yelp as swiftly as if Yelp were the religion they’ve been part of since birth and their family has been part of for generations.

The company assigns community managers as a means of getting people excited about being social and essentially getting addicted to the Yelp community via their social events. And the community managers are really, really pushy sometimes. When I was first nominated to be an Elite (I guess someone like my writing enough), the community manager kept after me to join up even though I declined initially multiple times. I finally accepted, but she said I had to put a real photo of myself up. I did and quietly a few weeks later took it down, but within a day another community manager wrote a message (with a condescending twist): “you need to have a photo up, etc, we realize the responsibilities(?) that come with being an Elite aren’t for everyone(??)” and so on and so forth. I decided around that time to ask to be relieved of Yelp elite “duties” (which I guess involve…well, I’m not sure what exactly. Having a massive ego, perhaps?)

Point is, Yelp is a pretty good site in a lot of ways but it’s utterly ruined by their specious business practices and their really, really off-putting high school manner of how they conduct their social affairs and businesses.