What do you take more to heart? The in-depth reviews of products and services conducted by writers at magazines and blogs, or the real-world reviews of your peers? We believe the proper stance is somewhere in the middle.

While expert reviews certainly fill a needed space, providing well-rounded analysis of each little nuanced feature of a product, peer reviews have the advantage of speaking to you on your level as a consumer. It is for this reason that SharedReviews is harvesting a community of peer reviewers to provide real life testimonials for things that affect their real lives.

Our reviewers (typically) aren’t conducting reviews in controlled labs with specially assigned review units, they’re reviewing product that they purchased off a shelf and pulled it out of a box — just as you would have.

It’s this difference that builds the influence of our peer review model. We’ve built SharedReviews around the premise that consumer opinions are as important, or more, than those of experts. The reason is that they’re often more applicable to the ways in which you might be using the item being reviewed.

To be clear, we’re not discrediting the experts, they have their place, we just feel that you have a place right beside them. They might understand things like variable bit rates, dots per inch and refresh rates, but when it comes down to it, what really matters, is how does this product effect your life as a consumer. No amount of technical information is going to answer that, but the opinions of your peers definitely could.