Call me a skeptic, but the latest DRTV products "review site" leaves me a bit underwhelmed. I came across AsSeenOnTV.info (http://www.asotv.info/) while trolling through YouTube. The comment there suggested that this new product review site had Web 2.0 geneaology, so excitedly I clicked, and pfffft ... nada. No *consumer* reviews, no networking, no commenting.
 
It's just another sales site. As an ardent believer in DRTV, I have no trouble at all with a site being positively devoted to the topic. But geez ... if you admit on your front page that the industry is known for its "exaggerated claims," offering genuine rebuttal would confer credibility. Instead, we get my very favorite sentence of "DRTVdom 2008":
 
     "There’s only one problem with this approach: anyone can participate."
 
Yo, peeps, methinks The Zeitgeist Train has blown right on by your inattentive little selves.
 
Okay, I'll be fair, I'll put the sentence in context. Here's what follows ... a justification of keeping consumer yaps zipped:
 
     "There’s only one problem with this approach: anyone can participate. That means even the Vendors of the products you’re interested in can add their own biased glowing testimonials (shills), as well as disgruntled individuals who may have had a bad experience with a product due to their own misuse or misunderstanding and completely trash a perfectly viable product. There’s really no way to know for sure if the opinions you read can truly be trusted."
 
So instead we're to take the word of ONE entity--these guys. Democracy, schmockracy.
 
What kind of trustworthy opinion are we going to get from a site whose monetization model relies upon ads for the products they're reviewing. Boy, I feel bathed in objectivity already.
 
Anyway, while ASOTV sure isn't the site for the job, a genuine social network built on the DRTV industry could indeed garner pretty good traffic. Maybe the folks at Response or the ERA could toss this one up on their whiteboard.