product reviews - coming to a blog near you!

While large scale retail sites like Amazon are consistently pushing for user generated content in the form of ratings and reviews, individual bloggers are also getting in on the action. Several of the paid blogging programs are now testing the waters for physical product reviews, and in the last week I have been approached to review things as diverse as arthritis gel and Air Jordan shoes.

This is definitely one of those cases in which the blog revenue service will do well to screen the bloggers that they commission for reviews, as sending out physical products is not cheap and the last thing you need is for someone in their twenties to receive a request to review arthritis gel, or a goth to review a pair of Air Jordans.

As the idea of sending out product samples for blogger review is fairly new to the web (or at least the non-A-list blogosphere), I'm sure we have some speed bumps and an initial learning curve to get past. As a blogger, I find it promising that we may be seeing opportunities to blog more about products we use every day (and getting a free sample is a nice perk!).