Shortly after I moved from New York to London six years ago, I made a tremulous journey to Tottenham Court Road to buy a TV and VCR. Not just any TV and VCR, I told myself, a European TV and VCR, my first proper rite of initiation in a new country.

After studying up on my acronyms – PAL vs. NTSC, LCD, VHS, PDC, and so on – I went and purchased the cheapest, least sophisticated models I could find, to the consternation of the over-caffeinated sales reps who wanted me to invest in a TV half the size of my bedroom, and certainly bigger than my tiny London fridge.

When I reported back to my friends, they too were disappointed. My choice of hardware (a Toshiba VCR and TV combo. Don’t ask me the model. I forget), the price I paid, the warranty: none of it was to their liking. In the world of consumer electronics, I learnt, everyone has an expert opinion. Everyone but me, that is.

The few times a year I need to purchase a new gadget, I usually first hit the reviewer sites, of which, there are an intimidating selection. You have Gadgeteer, Gadget Review, Engadget. Further down the alphabet, there’s ZDNet and Which?

And now a site called Crowdstorm.

Crowdstorm launched a public beta earlier this month with an interesting proposition: the product reviewers are everyday consumers. If you really like the Xbox version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter or your Brother laser printer enough to recommend it to a friend, why not make your feelings public on Crowdstorm?

The idea behind Crowdstorm is that many of us average consumers are capable of helping out a fellow shopper in need. We may not be a paid expert, but we know what works and what doesn’t. Put more glamorously, Crowdstorm is the social network model applied to shopping. Think MySpace for the gadget head. Or, as Crowdstorm founder Philip Wilkinson says, it’s about measuring and making sense of the buzz around products.

Instead of grouchy editors and demanding professional reviewers, Crowdstorm has, as of this week, 650 anonymous registered users who have written a review of more than 2,000 products, panning or promoting them along the way. The promise of the site lies in the feedback to the feedback. Readers are free to chime in, challenging the review or elaborating on it.

This is the promise (and premise) of Web 2.0: the appassionati will find each other on social network sites and compare notes. The end product, the thinking goes, will be an even richer, more varied, more timely treatment on a topic – whether it be a new Coldplay CD or the new head of the World Bank – than any individual (insert here: "expert") could conceive.

In practice, it’s not quite that simple. As I’ve seen on Crowdstorm, when you’re dealing with free labour, the results are inconsistent and not entirely reliable.

I found a review for a Toshiba SD-360E DVD player in which a helpful respondent called Terekhova pointed out: "It plays all the DivX and Xvid files I've thrown at it and the quality, for DVDs and burnt files, is really good via a Scart connection. Aces :)"

But for every helpful soul like Terekhova, there’s a slew of confusing product plugs with all the sincerity of a person working on sales commissions or, worse, a shill for the manufacturer.

For example, one of the most active reviewers, who goes by the handle Chameleo, has posted 130 individual reviews on televisions. He recommends Hitachi, Pioneer, JVC, and NEC with the same robotic enthusiasm. Interested in plasma, HDTV, flat, LCD, or projection? Yep, he’s qualified to talk about them too. Either Chameleo has a parlour the size of Wembley Arena, or he’s in the business of selling TVs.

In one case, another user, Shopguru, seems to catch on that Chameleo may be, gasp, a salesman. Shopguru recommends not the Hitachi 32LD 9700 LCD television, as Chameleo suggests, but rather a similarly equipped Samsung or Toshiba. Who is this Good Samaritan, you wonder? Shopguru turns out to be another retailer. Suddenly, I feel as if I’m back on Tottenham Court Road, being harassed by rival retailers to see what’s on special offer.

Wilkinson says these issues of trust will work themselves out over time as vigilant users weed out the disingenuous posters. On Crowdstorm, there is a point-scoring system meant to clarify who is legit. Reviewers get points for posting new products, Wilkinson says. They also earn more points when users follow their recommendations. The more points a user accumulates, the more credible they become as a source. "The reputation system is purely how trustworthy you are," says Wilkinson.

"Let’s say tomorrow Jim from Sony recommends all his products," Wilkinson continues. "Either people believe him and will follow him and add him into their network. Or, they will ignore him. In the first scenario, you tick them off. So immediately you lose trust in that person. Over time, they will not earn a strong reputation."

The potential breadth of products at Crowdstorm is impressive, but in the early days it’s not always clear from Crowdstorm whether reviewers who go by Shopguru or Chameleo have our best interests at heart. The cloak of anonymity offered by social network sites is not exactly the reassurance some of us consumers are seeking as we consider a 500-quid purchase.

The social network shopping model has some kinks to work out, dear consumer. Ditto for Tottenham Court Road.

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

Previous articles by Bernhard Warner can be found here

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