I was listening to NPR this morning - KQED Forum was discussing online review sites and the issues surrounding them. They were talking specifically about Yelp, and I decided to call in to share my story: a few months ago, I had a great engagement session with Jean-Yin and Al, and Jean-Yin wrote up a glowing review on Yelp. She didn’t tell me about it, I only discovered it because I was googling myself (yeah, I do that all the time), and I found the review on Google. A few weeks later, I went back to check Yelp again, and the review was gone! Jean-Yin assured me she hadn’t removed it or canceled her account or anything, so I looked into Yelp’s policy, and apparently people can "flag" reviews as suspicious and request to have them removed. Usually this is used to remove negative posts, but apparently someone flagged Jean-Yin’s review because it was TOO POSITIVE - they thought it was such a good review it must have been fake (or maybe it was a competitor trying to game the system…) So I called in to NPR to share my story, and they put me on the air. There’s a podcast (mp3 download) of the show and you can listen to it here too: KQED Forum. The whole show is interesting, but if you just want to skip to my part, it’s at the 25 minute mark. Special thanks to Jean-Yin for the writing the wonderful review in the first place, and for giving me the chance to be on NPR!

A shot from Jean-Yin and Al’s e-session: