We sat at our desk pounding away at our keyboards and managing the online content for Buzzillions. Somehow the Content Team ended up talking about Axe. Yes, Axe shower gels, the deodorants, the body shots. While comparing the smells of these Axe products, my colleague Pete revealed his dismay for Old Spice, because it gives him rashes.

Perplexed, we hopped on to Buzzillions and we researched the product to see if anyone else has that issue. Pete found the product and we read the reviews. Someone else actually had the same issue. Bingo Neat-o! Buzzillions really does empower[s] consumers by providing the purchasers’ experience with legitimate data.

This experience led me to think, “What does empowering the consumer mean?” Empower, (in street terms), means to give an edge to. Empowering consumers, from a sociological perspective, means providing legitimate data for consumers to make educated purchases. Data needs to be managed to ensure quality. Buzzillions now has over 2.3 million reviews. These reviews are managed by the 30+ member Moderation Team led by our fearless leader Lily. They scan the reviews to ensure that the data is coming from legitimate sources, and they follow strict guidelines that ensure useful comments.

In the end process, consumers can draw data from the reviews and make their own conclusion on whether the product is worth their hard earned money. The clean data can help answer many questions that a common consumer has. What type of person is this product made fore? What are some of the cool features? Are there common issues with the product? Should I get a warranty for the item? How good is the quality of the material? Is there a possibility that Old Spice might cause a rash on me? (It did for Pete.)

So Buzzillions is in some way a database for people to research and buy their product in a streamlined process. It offers a way for a community to get useful data to buy products that they will be satisfied with. Since I’ve been informed of the possibility of Old Spice causing rashes, I think I will stick with Axe. It smells really good. Trust me, check it out here.

Bert

So, last time, I choose Peet’s coffee because I knew it was a safe bet from my pre-PowerReviews days of shoveling beans for hours on end. But now that we’ve finished off our fresh coffee supply, it’s time to try something new.

One of our partners, Café Britt sent out a promotional email to their customers last week and generated over 300 reviews in just 4 days. While doing some moderation (i.e. personal research), I noticed that they were getting rave reviews across the board. Now we will be the judges.

Currently in the kitchen:  Costa Rica Dark Roast (currently “Top Rated” on Buzzillions.com with a product rating of 4.9 stars and 381 reviews), Costa Rica Decaffeinated (currently “Top Rated” with 4.9 stars and 104 reviews), and Tres Rios Valdivia (was “Top Rated” last week when I placed the order - 4.9 stars and 381 reviews).

This will be a three way experiment:

1. How effective is Buzzillions for a customer taking a risk on a product she has no prior experience buying online?
2. How well is our “Top Rated” system working?
3. Will Café Britt’s blends be delicious enough to overcome the plastic k-cup’s ease?

Here at PowerReviews, located in the heart of SOMA (South [O]f [MA]rket for the out of towners), we are fortunate to be in the center of some of the best restaurants in SF. Primo on Townsend and 3rd is known for it’s delicious jerk chicken. Rated 5 stars by the Content Team, we hit up this well-known hole-in-the wall joint at least once a week. Can I, a Content Analyst, who does not have the lovely looks of Giada De Laurentiis, who does not have the flair of Bobby Flay, who hasn’t traveled over a million culinary places like Anthony Bourdain replicate this juicy, slightly charred grilled, mouth watering, heavenly-high tasty jerk chicken? I, a follower of high-end fast food cuisine, shall try…

Day 1

As always, having sharpest and ergonomic knives makes your cooking experience much more satisfying. (Checkout Buzzillions’ reviews for the TopRated cutlery sets.) I start off by de-boning 4 chicken thighs (¾ to 1 pound total). Then I tenderize it, aiming to extend an even cooking surface on the chicken.

Mix the following ingredients up in a tight seal zip lock bag…

1) 2 garlic cloves minced;

2) 1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves;

3) 1 teaspoon curry powder;

4) ½ teaspoon ground cumin ;

5) ½ teaspoon salt;

6) ½ teaspoon powder ginger;

7) ½ teaspoon paprika;

½ teaspoon ground black pepper;

9) ½ teaspoon ground cayenne;

10) And ¼ cup of honey.

Toss in the chicken into the zip lock bag with the marinade. Shake it up! Let it sit overnight. In the morning, flip the bag over before you leave for work to evenly coat the chicken for the evening.

Yum-malicious!

Day 2

Ready for the Grill!

You can cook the chicken on the outdoor grill or in an indoor cooktop or range. Regardless, aim for medium heat. Pull out the chicken from the bag and toss out the rest of the marinade. On the outdoor grill, watch out for the hot spot flair ups. Toss it on the grill/grill pan, cook thoroughly! Make sure the thickest part of the chicken is running clear juice. (Anyway, all of the chicken should be similar in thickness after the good pounding you’ve given it!)

Let the chicken sit for 10 minutes before serving. The chicken should go well with a bottle of Matanzas Creek, 2006, Sonoma Valley, Chardonnay and a salad niçoise. Enjoy the yummy in your tummy!

Let me know how the jerk chicken tastes!

Bert

I just finished reading Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger.  It’s quite a hot book around the office here.  No surprise given our unique selling point is being able to tag products as part of the review process.

Basically the author argues that tagging will be the new way of organizing information.  No more categories. While I agree with his basic idea, I’m not willing to write off the idea of categories just yet.  Why not? Well, here’s a telling quote from Amazon:

“Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.” (italics added by me)

The author posits that the power now lies in with the masses in that they decide how information is organized and they decide what information is important to them.  However, I immediately thought of the deluge of information and the time necessary to find and parse all of it.  While I enjoy exploring the internet, I readily admit this kind of activity takes a lot of time.  Most of the time  I don’t have the luxury to take all the raw data and organize it in a way that’s meaningful for me.  I want information and I want it fast.  I don’t have time to read 20 news articles and decide what’s most important.  I like having The New York Times decide what’s the most important news story for me by putting it on the front page.

What are your thoughts on this book/theory?

Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip wrote a great post today highlighting our success metrics which helped us win the Innovative Publisher of the Year Award.

Take a read to see some interesting stats about our best performing affiliate partners including OneStepAhead, BiggerBras, REI, and Overstock (in that order), our conversion rate, and our performance rank in affiliate networks.

Factoids from Innovative Affiliate Buzzillions.com

Ours is Dutch.

Dutch is a corgi. He’s been hanging out with us at the office all week while his owner, Gautam, our VP of engineering, is out for a wedding and honeymoon in India.

We really like having Dutch hang out with us. He’s a real active participant in the goings ons at the company.

Here he is hanging out with IT and watching over our servers.

Here he is hanging out with the moderators, checking over the reviews to make sure they aren’t offensive.

He’s such a trooper!

Everybody’s time is precious. To many, coffee is precious as well.  And, to many, the planet is precious.  These groups are certainly not mutually exclusive, but with our current coffee maker they are becoming that way.  Every cup of coffee made in the office creates a plastic, non-biodegradable, non-recyclable byproduct.  We throw away at least 200 of these plastic k-cups per week (low estimate).

Now, I know better than to mess with people’s coffee.  No matter how wasteful our Keurig Brewer might be I know that it makes tasty coffee, that it’s time efficient, and that it’s not going anywhere.  No worries, Green Mountain makes an eco-friendly solution – “My-K Cup “ – a reusable filter that fits into the machine the same way that the plastic one does. It makes coffee in exactly the same amount of time*! Plus, since this mesh filter is not bound by the limited k-cup options, we can branch out to fresher coffee: actual coffee beans, locally roasted beans…even locally roasted hipster beans!

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first “coffee of the week” picks are from Peet’s.  Since I used to be a barrista there, I had a few favorites that we ordered to be our trial run:  Major Dickason’s Blend , Ethiopian Fancy, and Sumatra.

If the ‘green’ option makes a higher quality cup o’ joe, will that benefit outweigh the cost of an additional 2 minutes spent brewing and breaking the habit of using the disposable cups? Stay tuned…

*Disclaimer: yes, admittedly, it does take a few seconds pre-coffee-brewing to fill the filter with grounds and then a minute or so post-coffee-smelling-yummy-in-cup to rinse it out.

You know what they say about all work and no play. Here at Buzzillions we work hard but we also like to have fun. For Cinco de Mayo we had a piñata party where participants put a bag over their heads and were then spun around several times before being let loose to wreck havoc on a poor helpless donkey.

As if that wasn’t hard enough, we also rigged up a pulley system where someone could control the height of the donkey.

Take a guess at who’s who.

Our very own Danny Hsu accepted the  “Innovator Publisher of the Year Award” at the Golden Link ceremony in NYC earlier this week. What an honor!

Check out the video of the very snazzy black-tie awards below (Danny appears at 57 seconds )

Some of our top performing retailers we share with LinkShare:

Overstock
Online shoes
Sierra Trading Post
Toys R Us
Sports Authority
Ace Hardware

Ahhh the food challenge. If you’re not familiar with the phenomenon, it’s an epic right of passage usually restricted to teenage boys in which participants race to finish large quantities of low-quality food. At Buzzillions, this vestige of adolescence is alive and well. Coney Island has the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest and Buzzillions has… the Wendy’s Dollar Menu challenge, the Milkshake challenge and the deceptively difficult Cinnamon Teaspoon challenge.

When it comes to food challenges, certain employees among us like to push the envelope. While our staff has yet to produce a hot dog eater as celebrated as Takeru Kobyashi, we have our fair share of cult heroes and unlikely champions. Enter Matt Wendling and Gautam Prabhu. Anything they may lack in stomach capacity, they make up for in sheer ingenuity. Since we’re all about reviews here, here’s my assessment of two food challenge all-stars:

Gautam aka The Unsung Hero ****

Pros: Boundless enthusiasm for challenges, Puts his money where his mouth is

Cons: Rarely actually participates*

Best Uses: Instigating, Betting on food challenges

Review:

Behind every good food challenge is a good instigator. If a sentence starts off with “Wouldn’t it be gross if…" Gautam happily lays down a $5 bill for whoever will take said dare. Gautam rarely participates in food challenges, but without him, the Wendy’s Dollar Menu challenge never would have come about. Who could take the idea of racing to eat each item of 10 items of the Wendy’s Dollar Menu from dream to reality? Who could rope at least 10 of his colleagues into participating without participating himself? Who would be elated rather than disgusted watching the spectacle from beginning to bitter, super-sized end? Gautam, that’s who.

*There is only one known instance of Gautam participating in a food challenge. Rumor has it that he attempted the Cinnamon Teaspoon challenge in the Fall of ‘07, but lost on a technicality.

Matt Wendling aka The Machine *****

Pros: Impossibly large stomach capacity, Loves food

Cons: Never lets anyone else win, Susceptible to food comas

Best Uses: The Wendy’s Dollar Menu challenge, Chugging frozen concoctions

Review:

Since I joined the company in November, I’ve witnessed Matt’s food challenge prowess on two occasions. One involved a blender, a Wendy’s frosty and a large order of fries. Imagine a sludge made of cold potatoes and chocolate milk. Now imagine drinking it in 3 minutes flat. But Matt did not rest on his laurels. Some months later, Matt took on some stiff competition from across the company, and came out ahead. Remember the Wendy’s Challenge? Using the weaving and bobbing technique he went from fries to chicken sandwich to chili and finished all ten 10 items in 10 minutes. Tasty.

Stayed tuned for more adventures, but never, ever try this at home.

Angela