reviews

This consumer review thing may need to be rethought. Like just about everything else that came out of the Web 2.0 movement, customer reviews of businesses are huge targets for abuse.

The new BlackBerry storm mobile device hit store shelves on Friday and sold over 100,000 units over the weekend according to InformationWeek. Not all of us are so eager to plop down our hard earned money without getting to know a device a little better though. Thankfully, there are plenty of people to review it and give us walkthroughs of the device's capabilities, five of which are the subjects of this article.

The metal gods tossed their management team under the proverbial bus after those managers demanded takedowns of positive reviews by bloggers of some rough takes of Metallica's newest project.

Given the number of Facebook apps in existence, allowing for reviews of them seemed like a good way of tracking which ones worked.  Fake reviews have become an issue, though, and Facebook's attempts to address the problem haven't been too effective.

The ambitious project by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, dubbed a Google challenger in search, elicited a tepid response from reviewers.

Holiday shoppers are increasingly looking to online ratings and reviews to make decisions about their offline purchases according to Bazaarvoice Bazaarvoice data revealed an increase in ratings and review activity for the week of November 19-26,2007, with a peak on Thanksgiving evening as shoppers prepared for Black Friday. Bazaarvoice said it served 1,400 ratings and reviews per second at the peak, which took place at 9:25 pm EST on Thursday, November 22.

Amazon.com has launched "Customer Video Reviews" which allows customers to use video to express and share their opinions about products sold on the retailers Web site.

More people are looking to online reviews, which are having a significant impact on their purchasing decision.