It’s been a longer road than I thought it would be to get to this point (isn’t it always), but we’re finaly here and really look forward to throwing our ideas into your hands for some feedback. I thought long and hard about what to put into this first post and decided to start off with the ideals behind what we are attempting to accomplish before getting into the gritty details of how we plan on doing it.

You are not a Commodity! As you can tell by our Home Page, we feel that it isn’t fair for community sites to generate all of this profit off of your creativity without giving something in return. This belief goes beyond just rev-share where users are rewarded for their personal contributions alone. There should be mechanisms in place that allow users to define themselves within the community and be rewarded not only for the contributions that they make, but also how much effort they put into sharing them.

Consumers are Powerful: Although all of us can dictate markets with our spending power, you may be surprised that your experiences are much more valuable than where you spend your money alone. We want to provide a platform that allows you to share those experiences in order to band with others so that your messages to the big brands can’t be ignored.

A Review is more than just an Opinion: With over two thirds of all economic activity in North America influenced by shared opinions, today�s online resources don�t effectively convey a very important factor when we experience word of mouth feedback, who the person is that’s sharing. We will provide as many mechanisms to search and subscribe by user exposed profile information as we do the review data itself. We feel it’s as important to understand who the reviewer is in order to add the necessary relevance to what their experiences were.

Interactions should be Fun: Although there are a few venues for you to share your consumer opinions, we want your experiences in our domain to be rewarding both emotionally as well as financially. We want you to have fun, and whether that’s competing for bounties (More on that soon) or popularizing your contributions within the community, you should earn the respect and reward you deserve for sharing those experiences with others.

Today is our new site launch, and we’ll be kicking off the Contributor Beta the beginning of next month which will give us the seed content to refine our advertising and distribution models. We can�t wait to hear everyone’s feedback, so for those who have signed up we’ll be opening up the Forum even sooner.

We all look forward to your future review of SharedReviews.