I just recently rediscovered Yelp, a website which uses the community to rate businesses. When it first came out, I got invited to signup and I did, but I didn’t really do much with it.

Then I began using it to lookup places to eat in hopes of using other peoples’ opinions to sway me one way or another. It was my hope that the opinions of Yelpers would help me better than using Zagats, which, to me, is no help at all.

Why is that? It’s because Zagats has EVERY restaurant in the universe in there. How do you pick from a list of a 40 5-star restaurants? They all seem the same given the text descriptions. Maybe it would be better if they had pictures, but they don’t. Generally, it doesn’t cater to my tastes in particular.

The Black Book series of city guides has been the best thing so far. Somehow I’ve connected with the reviewers who put that together and they’ve consistently picked restaurants that I know I like. It’s the best guide for me out there.

I hope that Yelp can become the same thing for me.

But most importantly, I wanted a place to remember where I went and how I felt about it. Yelp provides a nice GUI to do that. And they have a nice mobile implementation to be able to look up stuff while on the go.

Check out my Yelp reviews with this handy module:

Do your tastes mirror mine?