Video Product Reviews a Comin’

Brian Smith, perhaps the most knowledgeable person regarding online/comparison shopping alive today, has a post at Search Engine Land about video product reviews being added to Smarter. ShopWiki also has them. We’re going to see more of this too.

Using video is a novel strategy to get people to review products, which is challenging inherently. But here’s where I think online video breaks down somewhat. Clearly the additional information that video provides can be very valuable in a number of situations. But watching some of these product reviews is just excruciating in my opinion.

Here’s what is needed: a rating system (a la Digg) for the video reviews themselves so that I can sort the most helpful reviews from those that are merely narcissists on their webcams (how many iPod Nano reviews does one need to see?).