The number of reviews in Revyu has been steadily creaping up, and I’m really pleased to note that we recently passed the 1000 review mark. The 1000th review came from Revyu stalwart Paddy and was a less than glowing review of Google’s recently launched Chrome Web browser. As always, real opinions from real people motivated to write reviews make it much easier for the rest of us to work out what’s hot and what’s not. Here’s to the next 1000.

In terms of development, it’s been a quiet time for Revyu since winning last year’s Semantic Web Challenge, but there’s plenty going on behind the scenes, and much more planned for the future. Probably the biggest change has been that I submitted my PhD thesis and took up a new job in the Talis Platform Team, IMHO one of the hottest groups around working on Semantic Web technologies. My role is as a researcher, working on recommender systems and continuing the contribute to the Linked Data effort. Needless to say there are many nice parallels between this work and Revyu.

Usage figures on the site have continued their upward trend in the last few months, with more than 260,000 page requests last month alone, and on average almost 14,000 page requests per day so far this month. The continuing upward trend is helped by (or possibly a result of) an increase I perceive in the number of contributing users, with what seems to be a slowly rising proportion of contributions coming from people we don’t know. I’ve certainly had less time to contribute reviews, but this hasn’t slowed the rate of new additions, and stalwarts such as drewp are still going strong.

One of the other things we’ve been working on, which may have had an effect on traffic, is the improvement in our coverage of pubs, bars, restaurants and cinemas in London, thanks to a data dump from the Randomness Guide to London. Kake (who’s been a welcome contributor to Revyu) and co at the RGL were kind enough to give us a dump of their database, allowing us to import basic information about roughly 700 places in London into Revyu, ready and waiting to receive your reviews. In due course we’ll use the excellent RDF output from RGL to show you fancy maps of the places we’ve imported, just like we do for places in Milton Keynes (e.g. the Brothers Fish Bar).

So, that’s what we’ve been up to, amongst other things. In the medium term we’re looking at ways to improve the underlying infrastucture behind Revyu, so that we can host lots more data and loads more reviews. I don’t want to say too much at this stage until the plans are more concrete, but one element I’m really excited about is to prospect of better Revyu APIs, in addition to the existing SPARQL endpoint. We’ve also got plans to clarify the licensing terms of data in Revyu, so you know where you stand when you build applications on top of Revyu.

Needless to say, exciting times ahead…

We’re absolutely delighted to announce that at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC+ASWC 2007), held last week (11-15 November 2007) in Busan, Korea, Revyu.com was awarded first prize in the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge!

Quoting from challenge.semanticweb.org, “The Semantic Web Challenge offers participants the chance to show the best of the Semantic Web”. Challenge Co-Chair, Peter Mika added “this was by far the most competitive year, with the highest number of participants ever, and a significant improvement in the quality of the entrants“. Revyu was selected as the challenge winner from a record 23 entries of which 18 made the first round and five were shortlisted. The prize was awarded during the ISWC + ASWC 2007 closing ceremony, where delegates received a live Revyu demo.

This is great recognition of the contribution Revyu can make to a Web of Data and the hard work that has gone into the site, not least of which from contributors to the site. Thank you all! We’d also like to send our congratulations to the winners of second and third prizes, Potluck and the CHIP Demonstrator, and the runners-up GroupMe and iFanzy. Well done everyone!

Today (at last!) I upgraded Revyu to use version 0.9.5 of the RAP library, the RDF API for PHP on which the site is built. This latest version includes a major rewrite of the SPARQL engine for database storage, giving major performance improvements. By my rough calculations the Revyu home page now loads around 5x faster, and you should see performance improvements right across the site.

The weekly email update I receive about new content on the awesome Kewl Doodz’n'Chyx blog includes a short list of search terms that have brought people to the blog in the past week. Inspired by this I thought I’d do something similar with Revyu and publish a list of the top search terms bringing people to the site each month.

You folks all work hard to write reviews but never have any idea if anyone’s actually reading them. Well the good news is that people are. In fairly impressive numbers. The list below shows the top 20 search terms bringing people to site from external search engines in August 2007. In that month the site received an average of 3765 page requests per day, and passed through the milestone of half a million total page requests since launch in November 2006; not bad traffic from a relatively modest 475 reviews I reckon.

Top 20 Search Engine Queries bringing Traffic to Revyu in August 2007

• 633 referrals: www.facebook.com
• 374 referrals: barn asia
• 217 referrals: barn asia newcastle
• 144 referrals: www.facebook
• 137 referrals: goosync
• 83 referrals: goosync review
• 76 referrals: 971 the river
• 74 referrals: helix apartments seattle
• 67 referrals: wharfedale micro drive in ear headphones
• 62 referrals: jbl platinum series
• 62 referrals: helix apartments
• 57 referrals: park farm bristol
• 54 referrals: hotel particulier montmartre
• 52 referrals: the garage wolverton
• 49 referrals: brazilian club london
• 45 referrals: review anything
• 44 referrals: kick and dicky
• 44 referrals: wavendon arms
• 41 referrals: www.facebook com
• 40 referrals: park farm parking bristol

It’s pretty interesting to see what’s on people’s minds, and I hope that these figures give you some encouragement and assurance that your views are actually read. For those Web2.0 fanatics among you, or those of you whose reviews aren’t covered by the search terms above, be assured that there’s a really long tail on this data (i.e. there are many queries that have led to traffic on Revyu just one or two times). Right at the end with just one referral is “fratboy tags”. I can’t think why.

Chuffed! Revyu has been shortlisted for the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge. Every year the Challenge (which is co-located with the International Semantic Web Challenge) seeks to recognise some of the best work in the Semantic Web world. From a record 23 entries Revyu has made shortlist of five, with the winners to be announced at ISWC2007 in Busan, Korea. Thanks to all Revyuers who have helped get us this far

My slides from the Developers’ Track talk at WWW2007 are now online – you’ll need a recent standards-compliant browser that handles XSLT happily. The talk seemed to go well – at least I had some very positive feedback afterwards. TimBL raised some useful points about licensing of Revyu content, and using the Tabulator confirmed the suspicion I’d had for sometime that the content negotiation on Revyu URIs isn’t sensitive to q values in the Accept header. Hmm, maybe time to replace ModRewrite rules with something a little bit more powerful? The session was audio recorded, so quality-permitting there’ll be a replay online sometime soon.

Things have been pretty busy behind the scenes with Revyu recently, which has meant the blog has been very quiet. More on what we’ve been up to shortly, but for now I just wanted to flag up that Revyu is being presented on Friday (11th May) at the 2007 Worldwide Web Conference (WWW2007) in Banff, Canada.

I’ll be presenting what we’ve been doing with Revyu in the Linked Data session of the Developer’s Track (alongside Tim Berners-Lee presenting Tabulator and Chris Bizer talking about DBpedia), under the title “How to Combine the Best of Web2.0 and a Semantic Web: Examples from Revyu.com”. Should be good. Any fresh reviews in the next couple of days are very welcomed. I’ll post the slides online when they’re properly finished.

Right now on the Web there are a couple of different views about how to deliver more data that is more structured. The Semantic Web world advocates the RDF view, citing the power of RDF as a representation model. In contrast, others favour adding a little extra semantics to existing HTML documents, using so-called Microformats. Some people see the two views as diametrically opposed and irreconcilable. Not so here at Revyu.com.

We believe that any initiative that brings greater structure to the Web is a good thing, and Microformats are one way of doing that (especially when they can be combined with GRDDL to generate RDF). Consequently, even though we support RDF natively, we’ve now added support for the hReview microformat to Revyu.com. The HTML page detailing each Review (like this review of Babel) provides hReview markup, in addition to a link to the RDF/XML version of the same review. As far as we know, Revyu is the only native-RDF reviewing and rating site; therefore this should now make it the only reviewing site doing RDF *and* hReview.

Many thanks to Brian Suda for providing gentle encouragement and going over the hReview with a fine-tooth comb and an XSLT parser.

Happy New Year! By way of celebration, I have now given Revyu.com the ability to send password reminders if you have forgotten yours. This long awaited feature is live on the login page. Enjoy.