francis
27th Oct 2006, 12:32 am
Metacritic.com (http://www.metacritic.com/) is an excellent site that pulls together reviews of films, music, books, games, books and TV programmes, works out an average score and posts summaries of the reviews. Not all publications give scores, so when that happens, the Metacritic staff go through the review and try and best-guess one (http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml).
I subscribe to the site's music RSS feed that gets updated 2 or 3 times a week with about 3 albums at a time. It's an excellent resource for finding new music (I found The Hold Steady (http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/holdsteady/boysandgirlsinamerica) through the site). They do keep adjusting the average scores as more reviews come in as I've noticed a couple of albums that I'm interested change percentage points over the last couple of weeks.
The all time top-rated albums (http://www.metacritic.com/music/bests/) (some very surprising ones at the top of that list) and worst albums (same page, scroll down) are interesting.
Overall, I like the site, although their advert placing is annoying (although Adblock Plus on Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/) sorts that out). Having said that, they generally have a small amount of adverts on the review pages, so that is something of a blessing when running Safari.
The colours work well together, there's a good use of white space and the review summaries are succinct, making it really easy to get a quick impression of an album. They've placed the important information at the top of the page and used a globally recognised colour scheme for "good", "average" and "Robbie Williams", er, "bad". I suppose my only niggle is that not all of the current year's reviews are listed on the left-hand panel as I discovered when I started searching for other albums that I've bought this year.
I subscribe to the site's music RSS feed that gets updated 2 or 3 times a week with about 3 albums at a time. It's an excellent resource for finding new music (I found The Hold Steady (http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/holdsteady/boysandgirlsinamerica) through the site). They do keep adjusting the average scores as more reviews come in as I've noticed a couple of albums that I'm interested change percentage points over the last couple of weeks.
The all time top-rated albums (http://www.metacritic.com/music/bests/) (some very surprising ones at the top of that list) and worst albums (same page, scroll down) are interesting.
Overall, I like the site, although their advert placing is annoying (although Adblock Plus on Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/) sorts that out). Having said that, they generally have a small amount of adverts on the review pages, so that is something of a blessing when running Safari.
The colours work well together, there's a good use of white space and the review summaries are succinct, making it really easy to get a quick impression of an album. They've placed the important information at the top of the page and used a globally recognised colour scheme for "good", "average" and "Robbie Williams", er, "bad". I suppose my only niggle is that not all of the current year's reviews are listed on the left-hand panel as I discovered when I started searching for other albums that I've bought this year.