Restaurant reviews, UrbanSpoon, and some math…

I was showering the other day and meditating about the things that I have accomplished with my blogging. Amongst the reasons why my blog is moderately popular (I’m not going to be conceited and say that it’s very popular, but there are some people out there who read it with some frequency), is that I have built some sort of reputation as a decently-trained palate, and a good restaurant reviewer. My friends (both bloggers and civilians) seem to trust my instincts in regards to places to eat.

Nevertheless, my blog isn’t exactly a food blog. It is a repository for my thoughts, the things I do, the concepts I am analyzing, etc. A journal and a memoir. It’s Raul’s life seen through his own eyes. As Barbara Doduk put it, it’s a blog with a Raul theme… 🙂 [Urgh, that sounded self-absorbed]

Nevertheless, I am kind of proud of my current place at the top of the Vancouver UrbanSpoon Leaderboard. With over 70 blog posts and about 4700 views, I feel really happy when people tell me (either on the street, or through email/comments) that a restaurant review has helped them make a decision on whether or not to eat at a certain restaurant.

The interesting thing is that, while I think it was me who suggested some type of ranking for restaurants, etc., I feel somewhat uncomfortable with the whole idea. Not that I want to hold on to the top spot forever, I am pretty sure I’ll relinquish it at some point. Particularly because, well, let’s be honest – I’m just one guy and there’s only so much money I’m willing to pay for dining out on my own dime! It’s just that I don’t want to be in some sort of competition.

I did some math recently (yes I am a geek, tell me something I don’t know), and came up with the View Density Factor (calculated as follows)

VDF = (Total number of views)/(Number of posts)

My current VDF is about 60 views per post, and I was talking recently to Karen Hamilton about her VDF (which is about 90 views per post), so I mentioned that she should be proud.

Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less about my ranking, even though it’s kind of nice. It’s a neat element to discuss whenever people ask me “so what is that you blog about” but I’ll be fine if/when I relinquish my # 1 spot. Throughout my life, I’ve grown used to relinquishing the # 1 spot. And you know what… it’s not all that bad. In the mean time, I’ve SpoonBack’d a number of reviews that I didn’t have linked back to UrbanSpoon, so we’ll see how those do.