Cool Tools = Review of Reviews sites
Kevin Kelly groks how Reviews are a poor man’s blog.
He’s done an excellent Review of Reviews sites - which is good fodder leading up to the first SF micro-content dinner. Now that Amazon has exposed ALL their APIs - we can build fat, juicy open Reviews servers - and fatten it up with all those Amazon Reviews.
A REVIEW OF REVIEW SITES
Scattered throughout the web are small islands of sleepless enthusiasts who have much to say about their passions for new stuff. They aim their opinions into review sites of varying quality.
There are two kinds of review sites: ones run by know-it-all individuals, and one powered by the peer review of a community of users. Of the first type: The advantage of a single voice is that — at their best — they make outright recommendations. The downside is that they have trouble keeping up with an expanding or fast-moving field with tons of new gear.
The advantage of the second kind built on peer reviews is that the collective can keep up with change; the fault of user reviews, however, is that they often have narrow experience and no sense of what else is out there. This is the chief weakness of Amazon and Epinion reviews; they judge too much on an item’s own merits and not on how it compares with similar products or substitutes. Clear recommendations are scarce.
What I want from a review site is an informed judgement. Ideally I’d like a very smart friend online who can give a single word answer when you asked him/her what you should buy: “Get this,” they would say. The wider the range of uses, the more choices in models, and the faster the innovation in that area, the harder it is to get a definite answer.
My model of the ideal review site then is one built on a broad base of user reviews, in addition to a field of experts conducting uniform and comparative reviews, and ends up with an extract of top picks or other recommendations of what to get. I have not yet seen a perfect site. What doesn’t work for me is a site sporting a vast matrix of all products and their features, or a site recommending a few products –ones that they happen to also sell, or a site with evaluations of gear they happen to get free from cooperative manufacturers, or heaven forbid, a site that has a few feeble reviews and is supported by a zillion ads.
There are some wonderful review sites. I found the following to be useful. For the most part they have what the weak review sites don’t have: a minimal ad environment, no direct connection to sales, a means to extract recommendations and not just feature lists, and users with enough experience to indicate how tools live up to others like it. I’ve ranked these “best of reviews sites” from 1 to 5 stars, listed here in descending usefulness to me.
I believe I have only touched the tip of all that must be out there. Where is the ideal review site for coral aquariums, horse riding, knitting, woodworking, cooking gear, kites, scuba diving? Not to mention a fair and practical review site for your own current obsession.
Send ‘em to me and I’ll add the ones that work to this page on COOL TOOLS.