Compare and Contrast

From the Amazon.com page for the book Google Analytics by Mary E. Tyler and Jerri Ledford

“…very useful.” (dave.org.uk, October 2006)

Which is extracted somewhat carefully from the review I wrote

In summary, the descriptions of the Google Analytics reports are very useful if you can ignore the over-familiar language, but the sections that contain deep techical detail are patchy at best.

I know I told them they could do what they wanted with the review, but doesn’t it seem like they’re clutching at straws a bit if the best they can come up with is to cherry-pick phrases from an almost completely negative review?

See, I thought I was being kind to them when I didn’t publish my review on Amazon. but if they’re going to abuse my review like that, perhaps I should change my mind.

Update: Ooh. First time I’ve ever been Dugg.

One comment

  1. I wouldn’t worry about it: the fact that it is the only review and is so short really stands out, and it’s labelled with your domain name so it isn’t hard to discover the full-length review from which it was extracted.It is really hard though. If writing an unfavourable review I go through it and look for overly-positive phrases that could be taken out of context and try to reword them.Amusingly it’s also happened to me t’other way round: when reviewing Advanced Perl Programming (2nd ed) for The Perl Review I tweaked the sentence breaks and carefully placed the title of the book to make it easy to extract “Advanced Perl Programming covers the technologies that all right-thinking Perl programmers are using these days … so you can quickly get up to speed with them.” But O’Reilly instead chose to use a descriptive sentence from the beginning of the review which barely had an opinion in it.

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