The Ian Bell Weblog

Whoever thought user reviews could be a big business certainly deserves a drink from me. PowerReviews.com has an interesting model in which they provide retail merchants (and other customers) a user review system so their customers can review the products they have purchased. In theory its a great idea. I know when I am interested in purchasing a product, I want to read professional reviews, and user reviews. The problem I have is that I find very very few negative product reviews! The Sony KDLXBR3 40-inch flat panel TV at ABT Electronics is a great example. There are 8 user reviews, and none of them are negative. In fact I am having a hard time finding ANY negative reviews on this whole site. So now you have to ask yourself why? Are the negative reviews being deleted because they hurt sales? And here’s another thing to think about. What if someone posts a negative review on not only a product, but that retailer itself? Isn’t the retailer part of the purchasing process? Arguably, I agree that retailer ratings and product ratings should be treated differently - but I wanted to put that thought out there.

Another thought - If  Power Review is providing the review system for these retailers, and then re-using those reviews on their own site Buzzillions.com (a shopping site that Power Reviews owns), what makes those user reviews special to that particular retailer? They certainly might not own those reviews, and now those very same reviews (which came from their store) are being used on a shopping comparison site where people might click through to another store - and not the store where the review actually came from. Smart for Power Reviews, but dumb for the retailer.

Now, I might not have all my facts straight - I admit I have not looked at the legal arrangements here, but I can’t help but feel something is fishy. At DigitalTrends.com we have thousands of user reviews, and to be frank, there are probably more negative user reviews than positive. But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? When was the last time you wrote or told someone about a good experience? Now when was the last time you wrote or told someone about a bad experience? Remember the old marketing saying “People with a good experience are likely to tell 1-3 of their friends, but people with a bad experience are likely to tell 9 of their friends, who then tell 6 and so forth”.

These user reviews just don’t add up…what do you think?

I am officially in love with the yet-to-be-released Audi A5. I think its a beautiful car.

 What do you guys think? Time to trade in the BMW 330? It has a whole 7200 miles on it in two years (I carpool).

The new Adult Swim low bandwidth site is quite possibly the best site I have ever seen.

Our content has been up on MSN Canada for about a month now, but I wanted to make sure everything was working before officially announcing it. MSN Canada will be using reviews, guides, and videos from Digital Trends. I am excited to be working for with them! You can read the press release about it here.

March 7th, we posted our guide on how to keep your children safe online. A reader contacted us today to let us know that Cnet posted a section dedicated to the topic a couple weekes after we posted ours. I admit that they did add more in-depth information, and really did a great job informing parents. I guess we should find it flattering that they are borrowing ideas from our writers. We still out rank them on Google for the search term How to Keep your Kids Safe Online. Now go read our story on how to keep your kids safe online, its better, and we do not confuse you with 20 different sections!

Our reviews at Digital Trends are being listed to the corresponding product entries at both Yahoo! Tech and Yahoo! Shopping. We are excited to be working with Yahoo! in this partnership. You can see some examples listed below:
BlackBerry Pearl on Yahoo! Tech
Apple TV on Yahoo! Shopping

Slacker, the newly formed music service and hardware provider announced that they have brought XM Radio co-founder Lon Levine on as an advisor. Slacker is a number of things including a web-based music service provider, and a portable media player manufacturer, plus they plan on developing and selling Slacker in-car satellite players.

While Jonathan Sasse is a friend of mine, I have a really tough time thinking they will succeed. XM and Sirius both have portable satellite media players, and they just plain suck. In-car satellite player might not be a bad idea, but they will have an uphill battle getting car manufacturers onboard, let alone trying to sell the consumer on a portable car unit. I just plain don’t see it happening.

You can read the full Slacker announcement at DigitalTrends.com

Samsung yesterday announcedthat they have developed a 64GB solid state drive (SSD) for use in laptops or any other portable electronics that could use a 2.5-inch drive. There was no mention of price, but with Apple and other notebook manufacturers reportedly set to announce SSD based laptops later in the year, I expect the price to be around $300 to start. Things are really starting to get interesting. Hard drive manufacturers like Western Digital and Seagate better start getting competitive or they might be extinct from the consumer market in the near-future.

I posted yesterday at Digital Trends that Microsoft officially announced the Xbox 360 Elite. For $479 bucks you get a larger hard drive, HDMI connection and everything in black. But I have to wonder, what the heck makes this thing so elite? It still cannot up-convert DVD movies to 1080P and it doesn’t have a next-gen drive built-in. If Microsoft really wanted to make this Elite, they would have incorporated HD DVD, to at least go head-to-head with the PS3 and it’s Blu-Ray support. Heck, maybe partner with Logitech and throw in a fancy Xbox 360 remote control! The Elite is a disappointment to me.

Just read over at MediaBuyerPlanner.com that advertisers are already starting to line-up for the new YouTube competitor planned by NBC, News Corp., and Yahoo (possibly TimeWarner/AOL and Viacom too). Why, you might ask? Because they do not plan on using user-generated content - at least they have not said anything about it yet. Instead, they will use a collection of original broadcast contenet which we all know is easier to attach a brand via an advertisement too. User generated video content is not selling and Google is still struggling to take advantage of the YouTube purchase.

The moral of the story: When you own the content, you can sell it. Google simply does not own any original content they can sell. Advertisers are scared of advertising on non-predictive video. As a content producer, why partner with Google when you can sell it directly yourself? Business 101 - class is over