Two years ago, marketer Todd Rutherford began selling book reviews. Some people complained that reviews could be bought from a service; many others bought reviews from that service. And not just any reviews–gushing, exciting reviews. The NY Times walks us through it:

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu (an analyst) estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.