Amazon Secret Weapon No. 1376: the race for recognition

Amazon.com drives high-quality reviews by rewardingreviewers - not with cash but with recognition, respect and goodwill.Yet again, the online book powerhouse leads the industry.

Some days it seems that Amazon really has pioneered most of the smartest ideas on the Internet.

Take Amazon's reviews - reviews of books, of CDs, of software andother other items. Though Amazon employs professional reviewers andbuys in outside product reviews, its reputation as a review powerhouserests with its vast array of user reviews, all written for free. Andthe readers who come for the reviews stay to transact.

Such "user-created content" has recently captured the imagination ofInternet commerce practitioners. Some 45 per cent of site executivessurveyed by Jupiter Media Metrix in early 2000 already had user-createdcontent on their site, and another 44 per cent planned to add it.

Sites facilitating user-created content face one great hurdle: greatwriting, analysis, music and video require a level of skill which noteveryone possesses. Repeated exposure to true user-created music (asopposed to copies of commercial recordings) may rot your eardrums; thestock tips posted on financial sites hold even less value than stocktips from stockbrokers.

To encourage skilled content creators, you need to offer anincentive. Sites have toyed with small payments, well under the 65cents a word or more paid to professional content creators; back whenthe Internet Bubble was still round and fat, a few sites even musedabout offering shares to amateur content contributors. These strategieshave not brought success. And there's some economic evidence to suggestthat payments to previously amateur content creators may actually saptheir enthusiasm. Amazon, however, attracts astonishingly high-qualitycomments from its users. And it does so even though the sheer volume ofuser reviews makes thorough vetting impossible.

What is the quality of Amazon's book reviews? Take Brad Delong,listed among Amazon's top 1000 reviewers. Brad is Professor ofEconomics at Berkeley, co-editor of the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives,and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the USTreasury. He's also a wonderful writer, one of that rare breed ofexplainers whom George Orwell had in mind when he equated clear writingwith clear thinking. Media giant Time-Warner pays him handsomely towrite a regular column for Fortune magazine.

Professor Delong has posted 22 book reviews to Amazon - reviews ofbooks on everything from Xerox PARC to French sociologist PierreBourdieu. All at no cost at all to the site. When I last checked,Professor Delong held a share of 679th place on the top 1000 list.Among those tied with him were physicist Professor Joseph McCaulley ofthe University of Houston, who also writes fairly intelligent prose.Amazon's reviewer lists are littered with this calibre of contributor.

Book reviewers come to Amazon because it's where the bulk ofintelligent, Internet-using bookbuyers come to shop. Some people wouldcall it a book-buying "community". Actually, it's both more and lessthan this. It's a marketplace - a marketplace where the currency issome combination of recognition, respect and goodwill. Amazon usersvote on whether reviews were helpful. And Amazon mixes those votestogether to create its very noticeable reviewer rankings. New reviewsboost a reviewer's ranking. The race-for-recognition system doesn'talways produce perfect results. Some reviewers engage in concertedcampaigns to promote their rankings, enlisting friend to vote for themand against rival reviewers or simply manipulating their own onlineidentities. Meanwhile, Amazon itself busily (and somewhat dishonestly)buries and even deletes many unfavorable reviews of books and otherproducts. Despite all this, Amazon's voting system keeps reviewerswriting, and the overall quality of Amazon's reviews remains admirable.

Other sites are now copying Amazon's write-for-recognition formula -among them the increasingly popular reviews-of-everything site Epinionsand the ambitious open-source encyclopedia Nupedia.com. If you plan tojoin the user-created content boom, you probably need to encourage arace for recognition among your own content creators.

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