Ask HN: Help me with this project - Gizmoojo.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help me with this project - Gizmoojo.com

12 pointskhangtoh12 comments

I've been maintaining Gizmoojo.com for the past few years and did not had the time to do anything with it. So I've been thinking about doing more with Gizmoojo and so have started thinking about ideas on how I could extend or revamp Gizmoojo.

Gizmoojo started out as gizmo/gadget review site. The whole concept counts on average geeks/joes to create review/content on the gadgets that they love. In doing so, they get to share revenue from Amazon Associates Ads on their review pages. So here is an actual review page: http://gizmoojo.com/moojos/show/12

Well as you can see, the site has a cool design (IMO) but the show stopper is getting people to sign up and submit reviews.

What should I do with Gizmoojo? I really would appreciate any suggestions/ideas/help on what should I do next.

Here's what I'm thinking about. Making Gizmoojo sort of a gadget wiki but on steroids. Meaning, each gadget/gizmo/device gets it own dedicated page. Users can edit pages like a wiki and thus maintaining history of edits. Pull in amazon reviews, tweets, pics from flickr. Users can submit deals on that item.

Are you a rails developer or learning rails? If you are interested on working on this project, I'm happy to discuss. Email me ( address's in my profile )

I've created a hamburger restaurant where I'm expecting average Joes to walk in off the street and cook the hamburgers, in return for a percentage every time they make a sale. Sound promising?

Of course not. The burgers will be inconsistent and usually bad, and there'll either be too many or too few cooks at any given time.

It's the same with review sites. You're expecting people to do the work for you in return for a completely unknown amount of money. You'll get a zillion reviews of some popular thing, and no reviews of DRAM, and reviews will be inconsistent and bad.

If you think it's worth people's time to write reviews, then you should hire people to write them first. Hire college students at $15/hr. They can work from their dorms. Assign them products to review. Set standards. Have quality control. You can probably build up a really good set of reviews for only a few hundred hours of labor. Probably less than you've put into the technical part of the site.

Eventually, once you have a thriving ecosystem, average Joes will contribute reviews. But you can't just wave your hands and expect people to flock to your site to do work on speculation. You have to lead.

I've got to go with the name issue. Not sure if you were first or not but your name is too close to gizmodo. Also you need more content, not just on the front page but some of the categories are empty.

Of the six people on the front page only one has a picture, they could all go. More text, having just pictures makes it look like a shopping site.

For example the "SanDisk Sansa c150 2 GB MP3 Player" is just a picture. How about an excerpt from the review "Enjoy skip-free music playback and photo slideshows with the amazingly small and lightweight SanDisk Sansa c150 flash memory digital audio player..." while is much better than that thumbnail. Ok it looks suspiciously like a sales pitch but that was actually from the rewiew.

Graphically it's very nice, perhaps too nice. Like I say it looks to me like a shopping site. Is this really geek aesthetics? Maybe it should be more like ThinkGeek, Ars or practically any gaming site.

peterhi: thanks for all the great suggestions or feedback.

Put this in your .htaccess:

Redirect 301 / http://www.gizmodo.com

But seriously, when I look at the page:

  - it doesn't render properly in Firefox
  - it seems like a knockoff of gizmodo
  - it seems dead, e.g. everyone has 0 moojos.

Also if you go for a wiki like system then be prepared to moderate heavily, it will be a spammers paradise.

When I type "Gizmoojo" into Firefox (I forgot the .com as I simply copied your name), it sends me to Gizmodo.com .. I know it's been said, but if that's any proof you need a name change then there you go :)

First, find a better name, then we can talk

I saw that name and instantly thought "gizmodo.com clone/imposter". Gizmodo is one of the leading tech blogs out there so having a name that's 2 letters off of an already unique name might hurt you.

do you have any suggestions?

GizmoOjo.com

Ojo means "eye" in Spanish in case you were unaware.

Thanks for pointing that out, I did not know that.

Jizsploojo

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