Every product on the site is accompanied by a review posted by customers that have purchased and/or used the product alongside a photo. Consumers can also compare the item to other brands through one of many features on the website that helps shoppers narrow down their decision and ultimately purchase a product.

Customer reviews have been instrumental in helping shoppers make decisions on which products to buy. In April of 2006, J.C. Williams Consultancy and eTailing Group conducted a study that found that 92% of the 2,472 participants said reviews are “extremely helpful” or “very helpful” in final purchasing choices.

Three main compartments of the website are designed so that users can find, compare, and decide. Through social navigation using “pros” and “cons” and other descriptions provided on the website, shoppers can narrow down their search options. Review Snapshots helps shoppers to compare the feedback of other users and through an “at-a-glance” function, shoppers can do so quickly. Finally, customers are left to decide based upon all of the information provided on Buzillions.com.

Additionally, the “Affinity Recommendations and Reviews” is another feature where shoppers can choose a group that best describes themselves and from there, view the reviews and feedback from that group.

Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews, said in a statement, “What’s really missing in today’s online shopping experience is the human element and interaction that people experience in stores. We are excited to bring the power of social feedback into that online experience, and help shoppers make informed decisions at each step in the product research process. The feedback from our beta testing site has been invaluable, and we believe we have a truly better way for people to shop and decide what to buy.”

While mashups are now the norm amongst DJs and producers in the music world, it’s only as of late that the concept—blurring disparate, familiar audio or video files to create a whole new production—has been embraced by Hollywood.

A prime example of this is Paramount’s new movie trailer mashup campaign for its upcoming Mark Wahlberg vehicle, “Shooter.” With the online/mobile video editing technology of partner Eyespot, the Viacom-owned studio is providing users with a virtual editing suite to create their own customized trailer for the film, the best of which wins its creator an Xbox 360.

According to Laurie Racine, Senior VP of Strategy and Business Development for Eyespot, Paramount is helping set the trend for a new wave of movie marketing. “I think this is the beginning of a paradigm shift in the way that movies engage audiences early on as they ramp up,” she tells ADOTAS. “As you allow fans to almost recreate or interpret different aspects of the movie based on the content and the assets that are released to them to play with, does it change the length of time that they want to really play, and does that bring other people into the theater? [Obviously], we think it allows buzz to be created early on in an engaging way that gets fans very close to the filmmakers and the actors before things ever open in the theater.”

With the “Shooter” promotion, which Racine claims took ten days for Eyespot to execute, Paramount has provided contestants with more than 20 exclusive film clips, as well as the official promotional trailer, sound effects, still photos, movie dialogue and music from the film’s original score. As an added bonus, contestants can also upload personal music, photo, and video clips to mix in with studio content to enhance their mash-up. Once the user has the mix down, they can share their piece de resistance via social networks, mobile phones or other online video sites.

“We’re giving them not just typical trailer assets, but other things where there’s music and photos, etc., that they can manipulate,” Racine says. “It’s something that Paramount and certainly Eyespot see as the future for…developing social relevance to events, activities, movies, etc. that are happening along the cultural zeitgeist.”

To enter in the “Shooter” contest, users must submit their entry by March 26th, three days after the film’s nationwide release. Throughout the entry phase, Eyespot members can watch submitted mash-ups and cast their vote online for the most artistic and creative film. Along with the Xbox 360, the user with the top-ranked “Shooter” video will also win three video games to go with it, “Call of Duty 3,” “Gears of War” and “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas.” Additionally, four runner-ups will receive official “Shooter” materials autographed by Mark Wahlberg.

Though this isn’t the first foray into the UGC arena for Paramount, Racine says the “Shooter” push marks a big leap forward for the studio. “I actually think Paramount is at the vanguard here, because it’s not that they’re saying we’re going to give you just Paramount assets and you can mash them up against Paramount assets,” she says. “They’re basically saying, you can take your own stuff, true UGC stuff, and integrate it into our assets. That’s huge. It’s very dynamic, very visionary and forward-thinking, and I am truly impressed. I think they’re publicly one of the first studios to do this, if not the first. And from a conceptual perspective, it’s huge. It’s not premium content versus premium content. It is premium content with UGC in an environment that is condoned, encouraged and sponsored by the studio.”

While the gaming community is a likely target for “Shooter”, Racine counters that there wasn’t a specific target market going into the launch. “As someone who doesn’t fit the demographic, but loves this kind of movie, I would suggest there is not a specific demographic,” she claims. “I think that this is about people who consider themselves to be creators and movie fans in general, people who are specifically fans of the director, and fans of the star of the film. It’s pretty much all-encompassing, and we will know once this over what the [true] demographic will be.”

“Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events,” wrote editors Ken Paulson, Kinsey Wilson, and John Hillkirk in an announcement to readers last week.

To get people reading more news, the company has improved the site’s search capabilities, provided a “most popular” section containing the stories that are the most read and the ones with the most user votes, and has installed a special queue for stories produced exclusively by USA Today reporters.

Users will be able to let their friends on USA Today.com see what they’re reading by clicking the “Recommend” button at the top of each article. Recommendations, along with comments, Pluck-powered blog entries, and uploaded news photos, will appear on their profile pages.

Paulson, Wilson, and Hillkirk are actively asking users to send feedback about the new features to let them know if USA Today really is giving readers a new way to read the news online.

“This is just the first step in what’s going to be a strong partnership,” said Freewebs president Shervin Pishevar in a statement.

The Photobucket media will be accessible to users of the Freewebs publishing platform through Photobucket’s JWidget partner program and Freeweb’s unreleased Remote Pubishing API. Not only will Freewebs users be able to publish Photobucket media through their Freewebs accounts, but Photobucket users will be able to post to their Freewebs sites through their Photobucket accounts.

“Photobucket’s partnership and deployment of its JWidget allows members access to extensive libraries of still images and videos — from their own albums and from publicly available content on Photobucket,” added Pishevar.

Recently, Photobucket signed a deal with media and design software company Adobe to give customers access to online video editing tools. According to a company statement, the partnership will also let Photobucket users cross-post remixed videos.

Freewebs houses more than 14 million sites, according to company stats, including blogs, ecommerce, video, photo and music destinations. Photobucket claims more than 35 million users, who upload more than 7 million pieces of media per day.

“The User Revolution” looks at the Internet as a form of mass media and anticipates a 21% annual growth rate through 2011. Piper Jaffray believes the major Internet trend is towards consumers, who will increasingly take control of content and branding. Search revenues are also expected to reach $21.5 billion in the same year.
“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” said analyst Safa Rashtchy in a statement.

Piper Jaffray points out the increasing number of user-generated content sites like YouTube, MySpace and Flickr. The firm says that Internet usage patterns are changing, moving traffic away from traditional web portals to these types of sites which the firm as dubbed “communitainment” sites.
Piper Jaffray also believes that media is becoming increasingly fragmented, meaning that advertisers will have to buy more and more inventory in a variety of different mediums to gain the impact they want. The company also says that search will play a more prominent role and that online video will see more advertising growth as ad dollars shift away from traditional media.

“We expect the User Revolution, which has just begun to last several years before the new regime is fully established and the old statues have all been toppled over,” Rashtchy added.

Revver provides ad-supported video sharing services and shares revenue with content creators. As part of this new deal, Verizon will keep 20% of ad revenue from a video clip. Revver and the clip’s creator will split the rest.

The Revver videos will appear on Verizon’s Surround online entertainment portal by the end of the first quarter 2007 and on FiOS TV later this year. Access will be free to Verizon’s FiOS TV and broadband subscribers. Videos will be cached on Verizon’s system before being distributed to customers.

“This initiative will help us further support our creators by bringing their content to a whole new TV audience,” said Revver CEO Steven Starr in a statement. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for our company and the growing Revver community.”

The videos that will appear on FiOS will be hand-picked from categories on Revver.com. When viewing a video, FiOS viewers will also see related content. According to a company statement, content creators need to approve their videos for distribution over FiOS.

In a separate deal earlier this year, Revver will be distributing videos through Verizon’s V Cast mobile entertainment service.

See something that’s incorrect or biased? Does an article need more information? Simply click “edit this page” and make your changes. Your knowledge will be added for all to reference. And the man behind this project, according to the Wikipedia itself, is Jimmy Wales: entrepreneur and staunch advocate of open reference media.

Wikipedia and other projects under the banner of Wales’s non-profit Wikimedia Foundation support the GNU Free Documentation License, originally designed for software developer Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation. Even Wales’s commercial wiki hosting venture, Wikia, requires all hosted content to be under a free content license like GNU or Creative Commons.

According to Wales, he has always had a passion for knowledge, often reading his parents’ World Book encyclopedia as a kid. He describes himself as “a voracious reader of all kinds of things.” His mother and grandmother ran a small private school in Huntsville, Alabama where he was first educated. His father, a grocery store manager, didn’t graduate from college until returning to school later in life.

After getting a masters in finance from the University of Alabama and nearly completing his Ph.D at Indiana University, Wales set off for Chicago and made his fortune trading futures and stock options—not enough for him to call himself wealthy, but enough to live comfortably within his means.

“A large part of my studies and training was in game theory,” says Wales. Game theory is a branch of mathematics used in economics to model social interactions and their unforeseen consequences. “That has shaped how I manage the communities and how I have designed the social structure around Wikipedia.”

The community nature of Wikipedia allows it to be edited and reedited time after time, which gives it unprecedented breadth and timeliness. But that same openness can sometimes lead to “wiki vandalism,” where someone will publish bogus information on a particular topic, or to bias in controversial topics. The community is designed to quickly spot and correct those inaccuracies, with flags to point out articles that need attention and lockdowns to prevent anonymous contributions.

Following his success in the financial arena, Wales started his first commercial venture in 1996, an advertising-supported webring-style portal called Bomis.com, the company that would eventually fund Wikipedia’s early development. Until 2005, Bomis featured a premium section that allowed subscribers to view photos of hot babes. A few have criticized Bomis for offering pornography, but Wales equates Bomis’s babes to the types of photographs seen in men’s magazines like Maxim.

When he began his open encyclopedia project, Wales hired Larry Sanger, a doctor of philosophy he knew through the internet. They wrote frequently back and forth on each others online mailing lists. Both men shared similar interests, one of them being philosophy. Sanger refers to himself and Wales as “debate partners.” They had originally met face-to-face for the first time in 1995, says Sanger, when they were both still graduate students. Wales invited Sanger, who was traveling cross-country, to stay over in Chicago where he was living at the time.

In January 2000, Wales got word that Sanger was looking to start what would today be called a cultural blog. Wales offered him a position as chief editor and designer of the Nupedia project, a Bomis-sponsored initiative that was to be a freely accessible online encyclopedia, but contained an extensive 7-step top-down review process to ensure quality and accuracy.

Sanger took the job with Bomis, but the mechanics of Nupedia would initially doom it to failure. The idea was to have scholars write content for free and publish publicly through Nupedia. Unfortunately, through its three-year lifespan, Nupedia’s review process had only been able to fully approve 24 articles. “It was no fun for anybody,” says Wales.

Clearly, Nupedia was too complicated. Wales and Sanger sought a solution. According to Sanger, he was the one who brought Wales’s attention to a little-known web program called WikiWikiWeb written by developer Ward Cunningham in 1994. “Wiki” is a Hawaiian word meaning “fast,” and Cunningham designed WikiWikiWeb as a platform to quickly and automatically create links and web pages related to each other through common keywords.

Wales took the Wiki idea and commissioned an encyclopedic version of the platform to quickly generate content that could then be vetted and added to the Nupedia project. The idea was to cast a wide net and keep this new online encyclopedia as open as possible for as long as possible. At first Wales was nervous about what the results would be. “The first few days I had it up, I would get up late at night and check the site, convinced somebody would trash everything, but nobody ever did,” says Wales.

For the first year or so, as head of the Nupedia project, Sanger also ran the new Wikipedia, dubbing himself the “Chief Instigator,” building the Wikipedia community and writing many of the Wikipedia’s policies, many of which are still followed today. Wales gave him complete freedom to direct the project.

Shozu’s services can be accessed by media companies and commercial users. Other services include the Share-it image upload service and ‘Zu-casts’, which is a partnering service that allows information to be delivered to a handset.

Atlantic Records has already enlisted the services Shozu in the past, when Shozu-enabled phones were used during the Chevrolet-sponsored YouTube New Years Eve Countdown. In turn, concert clips that included Gnarls Barkley, Panic! At the Disco and Paolo Nutini were sent to YouTube using the Shozu devices.

In a press statement, Livia Tortella, General Manager and EVP of Marketing and Creative Media, Atlantic Records, said “the New Year’s Eve Countdown was a milestone in mobile music promotion, but it was a one-time event. This agreement will enable our artists to share video and photos with their fans in a unique and more urgent way. In addition to providing bands the opportunity to deliver a steady stream of content to both phones and other online sources, it provides a framework for community.”

Access to performances, backstage events, rehearsals, warm-ups, pre-scripted skits, tour activities, bus scenes, day-in-the-life images and other activities will be able to be uploaded in the form of photos and video clips.

Jen Grenz, Global Partner Marketing Director for ShoZu added, “camera phones open up broad new opportunities to connect performers and fans, from uploading and downloading of promotional content to mobile advertising that can sell music, ringtones, wallpaper and concert tickets from the handset, but the main barrier to date has been ease of use.”

The system lets video blog producers create their own ads, ensuring that the ad content matches up with the rest of the show, and include clickable links that can send the user directly to the advertiser’s website. The system is available through the standard Blip.tv sponsorship sales program and the Blip.tv open advertising marketplace.

The first video blog to use the new system, the MAKE Magazine do-it-yourself show, will run a MAKE-created ad after every show that contains clickable links directing viewers to purchase materials for the projects mentioned in the show from MAKE Magazine’s online store. MAKE also plans to use the ad system to promote MAKE events like the annual Maker Fair, a gathering of do-it-yourself enthusiasts that drew more than 20,000 MAKErs in 2006.

“This represents yet another major shift of power from the big-name networks and studios towards the content creators themselves,” said Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack in a statement. “The ability for a show to turn a profit is central to blip.tv’s mission, and ‘DIY promotion’ technology allows us to help an entirely new breed of shows make money from their hard work, creativity and often very substantial audiences.”

Lycos MIX will enable groups of individuals to obtain video clips from a variety of different sites throughout the Internet and lodge them into one playlist, which the company hopes will foster communities of people sharing the same interests within one destination. Accordingly, users will be able to respond to content on the website with their own content and video collaborations, which Lycos hopes differs from sites that only offer videos alone.

Brian Kalinowski, chief operating officer for Lycos, Inc. states, “Lycos MIX continues the evolution of community and video with a true Web 2.0 collaborative, contributory and interactive social viewing experience. Unlike social networking sites, each MIX is a collection of video clips where users socialize around content, not individual people or profiles, creating combinations of lasting content to share with others. With Lycos MIX, users can create an amalgamation of video content where others participate by viewing, commenting and adding more clips.”

The MIX account is free and users have the option of having a public account, which would allow any other user to add a video clip to the MIX playlist. For users who want a bit more privacy, private accounts can be established, where the user has complete control over what videos are added.

Other features of MIX, which is compatible with PC, MAC and all supported Web browsers, include a “MIX It” bookmarklet feature, allowing users to add videos from other sites to their “MIXes” without cutting or pasting URL’s, as well as a permanent comment and rating system that allows users to rate whole video mixes versus individual video content.