Review Resources - How good are they?

I've written to all of these, and worked with some that no longer exist, but I'm just going to list the online review sources that I am familiar with and are still open. Probably the best one I've ever seen is long deceased, sad to say.

YELP: -2 points [10 to -10]
www.yelp.com
Usability -1
Ethical business model -1

Yelp appears to be genuine, however they allow businesses to spam their site, and are apparently quite fully shilled by paid posters. One negative post as an experiment met with a dozen angry retorts within an hour and hate mail by the end of the day. It was fairly obvious that someone is 'patrolling' yelp and keeping the complaints down. Since it's a 'complaint site' this is very contradictory behavior.

Yelp has numerous quirky functions which I find to be very arbitrary and not well executed. From the half star to four star ratings to the ability to get negatively rated by the business you just rated, Yelp is chock full of problems with using it effectively. I pulled my posts and account after three months of attempting to utilize it.

Checkbook: 0 points
checkbook.com

I discovered that checkbook sends out a once-a-year pamphlet that they expect you to fill out and return, and this somehow represents all the businesses you've dealt with in that year accurately. There is absolutely no online element, and they publish wonder-filled articles about several businesses. There is no published standard of review nor do they accept any other input besides the extensive form.

I threw away the form. I still get mail from them requesting money. Not recommended.

Consumer Reports: 0 points
no web presence effectively.

Consumer Reports is supposedly a "watchdog" group, but who runs it? They don't publish their standards. I have no idea who owns them. As far as I can tell this group is no more useful than the BBB, and were it not for annual studies of products that they publish I would not even consider them a valid reviewer.

They are magazine based. Not very recommended.

Epinions: 0 points
http://www.epinions.com/

Another corporation disguised as a neutral agency. The front page trumpets that the site is a part of shopper.com, a corporate entity. How this causes people to trust them, I have no idea.

Not recommended.

Bloggers and Google. 10 points.

To date, since 2008 this is the primary method that I use to find out if a product or service is any good. In most cases, if people really love or really hate something, they'll blog about it.

Corporations are shills. Websites are started to make money off the users, and there is as yet nothing listed by google as a public review resource which really is. All of the sites mentioned above have one key feature that reveals them to be false: advertising.

If you advertise you are at least in part beholden to the advertising agency. If you advertise for the very items that you are reviewing, then you are breaching your ethical premise. You are not neutral.

There is only one true way to find honest reviews: Find them yourself. Any website gathering reviews that isn't a blog or a nonprofit agency is likely to be bogus. This is at least in part why I started blogging in the first place. I think people should know when I find a great business, or a terrible one.