I’m Yelping…are you?

I’ve started using Yelp more lately, but in a way that is not jiving with my natural use of the web.  See, I have three kids at home, one of which is 11 weeks old, so we’re not exactly searching for new restaurants these days.  We have the 3 or 4 near our house that we like to go to on the off chance we find the 3 hours it takes to get all the kids prepared and into the minivan (yes, we have a minivan, what’s your point?).  So pretty much, we’re not hitting a lot of hip scenes in Atlanta these days.

Oh, if you don’t know what Yelp is, its a restaurant user review website.  Fun facts about Yelp.

But I’ve found myself wanting to update my Yelp account with restaurants that I’ve eaten at.  It’s incredibly simple, the app is on my iPhone, I can take a pic or write up a quick summary and post it up there for all to see.  So its easy, I gotta give ’em that.

But this isn’t like me.  I typically like the fact that content is out there but I’ve never really been one to update the world with what I think about, well, anything other than digital marketing and tech startups.  So why am I posting to Yelp that a recent Starbucks I had some coffee at was “just far too dirty to get better than 2 stars“?  Got me.

My hypothesis is that there’s a new society that we’re slipping into where most everything is being generated by “us”.  And if you’re not contributing to this, then you’re not really a part of it. And somehow I’m feeling guilty about that and its time I started getting into the game.

I have a friend (you know who you are) who does the bittorrent thing and when he gets done downloading something he always tries to seed the content back to the torrent world.  When I asked him why (because for the short period I experimented with torrenting, I tried to disconnect as fast as possible because I worried that the police would show up at my door and scare my dogs), he says, “it’s the right thing to do.”  Kind of ironic when the whole practice of torrents is kind of/sort of/not really legal, but I’m starting to get it.

So if a Starbucks I go to is dirty, well I need to tell people about it so they avoid it or that Starbucks decides to clean its act up.  Because if I don’t, all my Yelp friends (count ’em, 4) might end up drinking over-priced, just-kind-of-average coffee in a dirty setting, and we can’t have that.

Oh, and if you’re Yelping already, become my friend already, I’m starting to get a complex.