Michael has a great post on how he'd like to see Amazon open up its reviews architecture so that folks can syndicate reviews (by reviewer, category), and publish to Amazon from their own blogs. Good idea.
Reviews are a perfect semantic Web application. Whenever someone writes a review on any site, there should be a metatag "review" with metainformation about the thing being reviewed, etc. embedded in the xml tag, which would then be exposed to search engines, tag readers and such. That way, I wouldn't have to visit a bunch of site and instead could pull this information. I'm in the market for an LCD Monitor and this problem reared its head. If you Google "LCD Monitor reviews", you get a bunch of different shopping comparison sites, reviews, etc, which are a pain to sort through. I'd like to be able to enter in a product into a review search engine that would return results from the appropriate commerce sites, blogs, and MSM sites in a way such that I could see any rating given, and easily view the info (and click to buy).
Problem with this approach, as with opening up personals ads from dating sites, is that it kind of disintermediates the site hosting the reviews. If I can pull reviews from a site without having to visit it (and thus being able to easily see their ads or purchase their stuff), the site loses revenue from this.
There ought to be a way to get around this though so that the site is compensated (and the reviewer)...is anyone working on this problem?
Update: I think Become.com comes closest to what I'm looking for, and indeed their results aren't bad for LCD Monitor. But I'd also like to see reviews from blogs and unlikely places. Also, I'd like to see reviews of services like hotels, restaurants, et al.
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