Secondly, how will the search engines respond to having identical content (if their user reviews are shared) across multiple sites? My guess is that it will not be a factor, but it could keep their PR rank somewhat low.

I think there is room for both companies as long as the focus remains on the customers not each other. When a company takes their eye off their own business and is threatened by the competition, they die.

Whose rating would you trust that of somebody who has reviewed and compared 50+ digital cameras vs that of someone who has only bought one digital camera?

I know someone’s gripe was not wanting to scroll all the way down to read the Amazon reviews. All you need to do is click on the link next to the starts indicating how many reviews there are. You’ll then be brought to an entire page dedicated solely to those user reviews. I use this all the time.

Another great thing I just noticed is that when you search for an item – Amazon will now tell you whether or not it is being sold by Amazon and if it is eligible for free saver shipping. Although some products I found that were being sold by Amazon but did not display free saver shipping so you may want to click the item and make sure in the side bar where they have other sellers that Amazon is or is not listed there.

This only works if Buzzillions gets major traction and it is a late comer to a highly competitive and crowded space. Buzzillions is also not uniquely helpful for users than the competition and lacks a true UGC feel to it.

The things Microsoft is doing with user rating and reviews on Collections.Live is way more interesting and useful to consumers and shows a much higher probability for long term success in the UGC/Retail space than PowerReviews.

The power of the mid and long tail customers shouldn’t be underestimated.

Cheers to PowerReviews for bringing a new idea to the table, and best of luck to them!

One major problem from a shopping standpoint is their product selection is limited. Since they’re only showing products for their merchant partners they really don’t have a large selection. Another problem is the domain. It just doesn’t make sense. Also, the site is lacking social features and I couldn’t really find much reason to register.

On a positive note their interface looks great and is easy to use.

Reviews are link bait. They are very good for SEO. It’s keyword rich content that improves merchandising. Even Amazon purportedly only syndicates a portion of their reviews because they understand the importance of having unique content on their site. When thousands of sites have the same syndicated content, it no longer has the same SEO benefits it could have had if concentrated.

Sincerely,
Ben

Ben Watson (ben.watson@thomson.com)
VP, Collaboration – Thomson NETg http://www.netg.com

– such as product #1, #2, #3 …. when they get to the top of search engine….

– then I would; take what got them to top; and create a php script taht generates in the same format – reviews for all – products heh

…

BUT…look at this page for a kitchen mixer…

http://www.buzz...&link=image

I am not sure I believe the reviews. I mean, who writes like this “This is exspensive for a hand mixer but this is worth every cent… Easy to clean and handle… It definatly gets the what ever job you need it for done”, and for a crappy little kitchen mixer ?

And all the reviews are from SmartBargain. I think they have some spam issues, I just drilled down to 1 product, so not sure if this is rampant. But after reading these reviews, was not inclinded to read more.

Advertising Age called this “the killer ad app” in a cover-story when we first announced it.

The difference here is that our model is based on partnering with the shopping comparison portals, versus PowerReviews competing with them. You can cast a far wider net, from an advertising perspective, when you partner with already established portals like MSN, PriceRunner, and Shop.com. Remember that they have spent years building a traffic base.

In short, we believe that partnering with many established portals is the more client friendly strategy. And we are seeing the performance from a customer acquisition perspective really pay off for our clients.

We are an ecommerce software vendor and a partner of PowerReviews. The process for collecting reviews they offer is significantly better than the Amazon free-form input and drop-down rating box. The integration was painless and the value it brings to an online retailer is huge – both for community building and search engine optimization.

We did a podcast with Andy Chen the CEO of PowerReviews a few months back at eTail Mid-Market in San Francisco: http://www.gete...-review-podcast

http://www.whatshottoday.com