Rafe Needleman: "I spent years managing product reviews, and I have a strong interest in the new consumer review services. I do confess that my inner editor instinctively mistrusts these sites -- it wonders if end-users can review products as well as experienced writers." This makes me laugh. When I was at O'Reilly Software, I learned how horrible "experienced writers" can be at writing reviews and how little you can trust what's written in the computer magazines (at least some of them). Not only did these journalists usually not have anything beyond 15 minutes of experience with the product they were writing about -- and often no need to ever use the product or understand what was important for that type of product -- they were usually quite lazy and/or overworked, as well. Half the "review" copy I ever read of our products, I wrote. (It was just our marketing copy, repurposed.) This was good for us, on one hand. On the other, they did the same for our competitors (like Microsoft).