.: ShaolinTiger - Kung-Fu Geekery :.

Herein lies my review of Hotel Reservations (hotelreservations.com), for the purpose of the review I will refer to the site as HR.

The interface for HR is reasonable, quite plain and grey in colour, I would think for a holiday/hotel kind of site it should have a more colourful and exciting interface to get people in the mood for holidays.

The central tabs DO NOT work in Firefox and nothing happens when you click them, they do however work fine in Internet Explorer. There's a mark down for lack of cross-browser support.

Companies really should ensure everything works on all platforms before releasing to the market as 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera do have a large market share.

The country switch feature also works differently on IE than on Firefox.

There are grammar and spelling mistakes in the page which give a bad impression of the site and would make me wonder about their professionalism.

This should be Advance I guess, and well to be grammatically correct it should actually be Advanced.

The range of hotels available is good but it just looks like it's plucked from some API from a back-end system.

The prices are reasonable, I found a good range when searching for hotels in Kuala Lumpur, they have a good range of hotels available all around the world.

I was unable to call the booking line as I am not based in the US so any reservations I make would be via the net directly.

The site has Adsense at the bottom of the page, I don't see any reason why a commercial site like this should have any 3rd party adverts?

Overall the site is ok, it's nothing special, there's no cool AJAX interface, the HTML isn't cross browser compatible, they have some pointless Adsense adverts, there are spelling and grammar mistakes and the only plus points are decent prices and a good range of hotels, but can't you find those on any old hotel site?

In this kind of space you really have to add value and differentiate yourself using your interface, as to a consumer that's all you are.

Now is the age of the social web, it's time to harness tagging, blogging and community building to support your product or service, don't try and focus only on traditional means online, try and use new and unique strategies.

Good idea, but bad execution and poor quality control.

This is a sponsored post.

Well everyone else is blogging about it, I thought I might just join in and see what the fuss was about.

Reviewme is basically a service for bloggers where you sign up and get paid to review stuff, the first review is this one, the review of the site/system iteself.

It seems ok for a few minutes to sign up to get a possible $100 for a review, sadly my site is not worth so much though.

It's by the same people as Text Link Ads which I also use as it's non intrusive, I don't really like loud, flashing or graphical adverts.

So TLA suites me well, I can put the links anywhere and they aren't in your face, it doesn't make a lot but it pays for the hosting.

I'm hoping for the same kinda deal with Reviewme, I can choose what I have to review so I don't have to whore myself out.

It's a neat concept (Apart from them keeping half, which I think is a little harsh..it should be more like 70/30% as we are doing the hard work!).

Basically the problem occured that people are getting ad-blind, they aren't seeing adverts so people will cool new exciting products still want to be seen but the traditional adverts were no longer working..

In step blogs and the global market place, as you've seen I've already reviewed quite a few things, those weren't paid, I just did it as barter trade for free stuff..so this is one step further as they are virtual services or software, everything is done online and I get paid to review as there is no free stuff..

It seems neat and I'll be waiting to see what kinds of reviews I get offered (if any at all..) and see if it's worth paying attention to or not.

But I should get paid for this post, so that's a start.

I can't really give a proper objective review of the service as it's only just started so let's give it some time, I think their initial strategy is just to create a buzz and get the name out there, get bloggers talking about the service and get people interested in having stuff reviewed.

I do like the fact that the reviews don't have to be positive, advertisers are told up front that reviews may be negative and most likely will contain constructive criticism. For me this is a positive thing as in the fact I've found people are very willing to hear the constructive criticism and make changes to improve their service or product.

This review of Reviewme is of course sponsored!