Over the years I’ve gotten a lot of value out of reading Amazon reviews. But only recently have I actually become a contributor to their sophisticated social system (a different S3 .

Now I’m discovering some great benefits to writing reviews — let me share them with you. Here are the reasons it might be worthwhile to be writing reviews of practically everything you read:

• Accredit yourself as a reader/writer/analyst/critic. Put your thoughts where people can see them.
• Easily maintain a nicely enumerated list of personally recommended books. Amazon does the work for you.
• Your reviews have an RSS feed that others can subscribe to.
• That means you now have another blog, and you can gain some typical blogging benefits by simply creating more quality reviews.
• Another badge/chiclet for your blog. You can cross-link your reviews and blog. Bloggers already like to sport the “Amazon Wishlist” widget, but an “Amazon Reviews” version (not yet created) is even better.
• Your Amazon profile may have high page-rank for your name. It’s the top result for my name!
• Auto-post your reviews as tweets. Incorporate the feed with twitterfeed.
• Point your friends to your reviews and they’ll be led to your interests and activity. Persuade them to read what you read.
• Your reviews make good links. Just like you commonly link to your existing blog posts, you can also link to your reviews (instead of the books directly). E.g., I’ve adopted Django.
• Your review stream is personal. Forget the fact that the book you’re reviewing already has 200 reviews; most don’t. People will still see yours regardless.
• People with similar interests will arrive at your content frequently — c’mon, it’s Amazon!
• Authors might end up sending your their books for free, if your reviews are top-notch.
• Immortalize the reading experience by spending a meager 30 minutes recording your thoughts. You already spent 20 hours reading it.
• Remember what you read. You’ll go through the book a second time to create the review and this will ingrain it in your memory.
• Be encouraged to read more. Maybe set a goal to write a review every week (and thus read more).
• Be inclined to highlight key points to ease review. Those will also be valuable years later when you revisit a book.
• Improve writing ability. Practice makes perfect.
• Think differently about what you’re reading when you know you’ll be writing about it. Get practice at summarizing and reading at high and low levels.
• Reviews don’t have to be long. Amazon even recommends brevity. It’s usually pointless to write just a couple sentences as a record that you read a book, though sometimes it works.

If you want to know what I’m reading (and maybe some other things about me), you can subscribe to my Amazon review feed, or just follow me on Twitter. I hope to be growing my review list rapidly.

Don’t forget to be clicking “yes” for all the reviews you find helpful!

Resources:

• How To Read A Book
• A nice article on How to Write a Book Review

In a future post I’ll discuss what it takes to become a top reviewer (despite my present rank of 893,844), or “vine voice”, what are the benefits, and whether it’s worth pursuing.

I have a hard time discerning the right point at which to stop tuning things. It took me three years of searching for the perfect blogging tool before I finally bit the bullet and just forced myself to go with an imperfect one: Blogger. And I’ve settled on a pretty vanilla default theme. How unlike me! Am I happy with the way it looks overall? Not really, but the default is probably good enough since lots of others use it, and viewers even recognize it. Have I spent hours tweaking various things on it anyway? You bet. Am I satisfied with having a .blogspot.com URL, instead of setting up micahelliott.com (which I own) as my blog entry point? Not really, but lots of others are content enough with it (paulbuchheit.blogspot.com, agiletesting.blogspot.com, sethgodin.typepad.com, etc.) And if I hadn’t just settled on it, I’d still be thinking about scaling, SEO, and optimizing everything. But now I’m constrained, and sometimes that’s just what you need. What did my three-year pedantry cost me in this case? I could have been blogging years ago, instead of being a secret genius writing only for myself.

I tweaked vim for five years before I finally settled on what I believe to be the perfect color scheme. I’ve spent seven years creating the perfect personal bash environment. You should see my $PS1. And my mutt/procmail look/configuration — it’s truly beautiful. Does my desktop really need that great picture? What awful time sinks!

I’ve got 30 articles almost ready to be “published”. But they’re not quite good enough. Wonder how many of those will actually make it. Should I just go for it? In this case, probably not. This is user-facing. And that’s the key difference. Are you a perfectionist in everything you work on, or have you been able to focus your perfectionism on things your users see?

I wrote this post in 5^W 10^W 25 minutes, instead of five hours, to force myself to not fine tune. Is it good enough? Probably, for a Saturday. Time to go enjoy the weekend now.

Note to self: it doesn’t have to be perfect if it’s just for me. Just go for it.