h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A question for you then, Mark, out of interest. If you always wanted to write music reviews, why did you become a travel writer?

Because I went travelling.

That's not as facetious as it sounds: I went travelling because I was tiring of editing computer magazines, and on the road I rediscovered my love for writing. I even got relatively good at it, but it took two years before I was sufficiently happy with my stuff to consider it publishable.

Now I'm just happy being a writer of anything from travel to fiction to wit to reviews. As long as it continues to interest me... if not, a one-way ticket to Morocco awaits.

I read some of your stuff on your web site. It will be interesting to see what we manage to write about Florence while we are there - a bit more mainstream than most of your travels but worthy of a tour guide I feel!

Something akin to the basic review/fan reviews shown on .amazon.com and www.indb.com would be good, but obviously time-consuming, space filling and detracting from the original purpose, though as a guide this would be pretty inadequate, particularly if "music" as an official entry was only three paragraphs long but with fifty discussion threads nattering to each other at random. Whereas all these other sites have lists of reviews, if a voting thing could be introduced then an average grade could be maintained from all the tendered reviews. Maybe one review offering each grade could be automatically extracted and displayed by some sort of non-human means.

Having done some reviewing in the past, I've found that the best results are from people with a deep knowledge of the topic who can both provide some perspective on the material being reviewed and provide specific reasons for why they conclude as they do, while engaging the reader.

The majority of fan-oriented reviews are more "I loved it....it's cool.... she's a terrifc actress...I had fun...." without substantiating in reasoned argument WHY. Additionally, many fans get quite defensive about their favourites, so regardless of the circumstances of the work, they just won't hear anything detractive being said about it.

Of course, most readers aren't interested in a reasoned argument, they just want to know if someone agrees with their tastes and if the latest action-flick's any good. Maybe that'll change in this context; I hope so, it certainly doesn't appear to in the wide world.

Fruitbat
(....for Virtual Mayor of London)