Below are the “slides” for my presentation. I’m using WordPress rather than PowerPoint. You can actually click through the images just like you can with PowerPoint (once you are viewing the image details, click the image itself to move to the next one in the gallery). If you have any feedback about anything, let me know. I created these illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. I was actually going to insert them into PowerPoint, but I realized that when you view the PowerPoint show, it resizes the images and makes them a little blurry. Plus I’m weary of PowerPoint anyway and wanted to try something new.

Note: Several people have asked if they can use some of these images for their own slide presentations. Sure, feel free to do that. You can link back to my site with attribution if you want, but it’s not required.

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After reading the comments residents wrote about Hunter’s Woods apartments in Murray, I decided that, although the square footage was about 300 more sq. ft than any surrounding apartment, the area’s crime (namely drug dealing) and the poor maintenance responses by the staff were enough to look elsewhere. The overall ratings appear at the top of the site:

And the resident’s responses appear below:

Ratings are also expanding into the academic realm: you can rate your professors. RateMyProfessors.com allows students to provide feedback in a public site. Imagine the power!

For example, my old friend Josh Allen, who teaches at BYU-Idaho, is now online, free to be rated on Google by his students. Luckily, his students like him, so the ratings work in his favor.

Similar to the apartment ratings, you can read the individual students’ feedback in all their detail.

Other rating sites exist too, such as Confabb, which allows you to rate the speakers at the conferences you attend.

These rating sites empower people to make better choices. Obviously they are subject to abuse (either from the competition, from the the slandered source, or from biased friends). But even in the possible exaggerations from the participants, the ratings raise awareness of issues that you might otherwise not carefully examine.

You also have to keep in mind that people rarely take the time to express their satisfaction, but the disgruntled will complain bitterly.

Apartments, professors, conferences …. what’s next?