There's a new sheriff in town, and no it's not 'big brother', it's just the opposite. Everyday people now have the ability to propel your business into the spotlight, or drag it down by it's heels.

How have these people become so empowered?

Consumer review web sites now give them a soapbox to stand on right in the middle of the virtual village square.

One of the new players in the Web 2.0 "review this business" business is Yelp and there are others including iKarma, CitySquares, OpenList and JudysBook, just to name a few.

While some people are saying, "Power to the people!", others, including business owners are crying foul. An article in The Register, claims that Yelp not only pays reviewers -- a fact Yelp owners acknowledge, saying, [they do pay reviewers], but "Only for about two month in new areas".

Yelp, was co-founded by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons who both formerly worked as engineers at PayPal. (I can't help saying it -- anyone who worked at PayPal knows what it's like to hear customers complain! -- but that's a topic for another review)... Yelp CEO Stoppelman denies that advertisers can pay and have bad reviews removed or pushed down to the bottom of the page where they are less obvious, (and less likely to turn up in search engine listings). Stoppelman seemed to back-track a bit and say that he couldn't argue that some "rogue salesperson" was pitching that scenrio to potential advertisers.

The problem with these review sites is angry people and dissatisfied customers are much more likely to seek out a forum to vent about a problem they had with a company than someone who's had good service, or is simply satisfied. People expect to be treated fairly, and unless a business does something extra-ordinary or has an exceptional product or offers deeply discounted prices -- most people will not even think to review that company. This tips the scales a bit and makes some review sites better than others.

Another review site, Judy's Book was started by two friends (Andy Sack and Chris DeVore). The idea and name for the site came from a "little green book" Andy's mother-in-law, (Judy), kept which contained information about local businesses she liked and would recommend to friends and family.

While Judy's Book differs from some of the other sites, when we reviewed the reviews, we found more positives than negatives. We did find that like other sites, Judy's book is also scraping content from other review sites -- what this means is that reviews appear on the site, but were copied from other sources. All in all, the reviews seemed fair and level handed, and appeared the ones that are not from other sites appear to come from genuine local people. In addition to reviews, Judy' Book displays "deals" and coupons related to the search you perform.

There are a few other players in the Web 2.0 customer review space, but they don't seem to viable. iKarma (Stock Symbol: IKMA), after three years still lists itself as being in BETA mode. The stock lists for 1/1000th of a cent... and there were no trades on it when we checked. The site is mostly complainers and the user interface is designed in a way that you need to keep clicking through pages with little content, try searches that require passwords and membership, making the site not very useful.

Many Web 2.0 companies are capitalizing on consumer's willingness to complain about a company. While the consumer gets no monetary reward, (in most cases -- although, as I stated earlier, some of these business review sites do pay or are alleged to have paid for reviews). The review sites offer no mediation or arbitration services so the only thing the disgruntled consumer gets is the satisfaction of slamming a company in public, with little or no responsibility to be fair or completely honest.

The grand-daddy of these sites is probably the Rip-Off Report. Companies who find themselves listed here are usually facing more than a few disatisfied customers -- many times the tip-offs to rip-offs are just the start of a long legal battle, or the beginning of the end of a company.

"Local" seems to be the latest buzz word in marketing, with all types of online marketing firms promising to deliver local results, local customers and their hard earned local dollars to advertisers. This idea is not new. In 1994 I advocated building local community websites as a bottom-up grass roots way to use the internet and to market local businesses, (www.framingham.com was one of my first websites and is now 14 years old). The new big players in "review" are attempting to appear "local".

Some of the companies pushing "local" include CitySquares and OpenList.

CitySquares is a well designed site, and easy to search, but the results pages contain little more than name, address and phone number of the businesses listed, (which appear to be just about every business in every town we tried). The site was probably generated from a huge database such as the lists available from Dunn & Bradstreet. CitySquares is more of a phone book than anything, but that's useful.. sort of.. While they claim to rate and allow reviews of businesses -- nearly all we saw had a 100% ratings, but with only (1) vote which was more than likely just set in the software that drives the site.

OpenList may grow to be more. The site is the local reach component of a power player. Still, many reviewson the site were nothing more than a shirt blurbs and links to reviews from other sites. What makes OpenList different than many startups is who and what the site is really about.

Open list is the portal for a company called Marchex. Marchex is aiming high, ar actually low -- down to the local level -- but on a big scale. The company was founded by Russell Horowitz, a billionaire who made his money selling Go2Net in the pre-meltdown of the original dotcom era. Horowitz's new idea: (a few years ago), register or buy thousands, no, make that hundreds of thousands of domain names, and all to target local traffic. Domain names carry a lot of weight, both in search engines and in people's own way of navigating to information. Marchex's portfolio is targeted at local business niche markets, SeatleInsurance [dot com] NewYorkDoctors [dot com] and many single word domains like; debts, salsa, petshop and puppys [dot com].. all are used to get what is known as "type in traffic"... this is traffic to a website that doesn't come from a search engine -- it comes from people typing a word or phrase directly into their web browser.

While Marchex may generate a lot of advertising income, I do not think the business model will penetrate to the real local level. Local people in each city, town and neighborhood are also setting up website -- many of them review local businesses, and whether these are full blown community portals, or one person's blog about their town -- these are the sites that have real local reach. Consumers are much more likely to take the word of other locals when it comes to where to eat, (restaurant reviews have always been popular on the web), where to get your car repaired, or where to send you child for daycare. No mega-corporation run review site, or advertising based national company can compete with true local content for credibility.

So, who's reviews do you trust?

The truth is, people ask other people they know for referrals; "Who do you use for a dentist?", "Have you tried the new Bar-b-que place?"... etc. Online, local websites owned and operated by locals, with content written for locals are probably your best bet.

Then again, next time you're outside, away from the computer, you could ask your next door neighbor.

(Feel free to review this article, and comment here or anywhere else on the web. Be sure to link to this article no matter which way your review leans).