www or world wide web as some name it, is a truly remarkable communication device, instant world wide publishing of ideas and thoughts through blogs, forums, email and other such types of digital architecture allowing collaborations to act in unity of purpose from across the globe in a way not even dreamed of just a few short decades ago.

However this expressive and relatively free medium does have certain caveats, or dangers, and not from areas that you might think of.

Take a web site which allows consumers to post their findings of products and services they have received from a supplier, you rave about how good they are, perhaps they successfully recovered data for you from a faulty hard drive, maybe on the other hand you had a terrible holiday and want to warn all against company x and their awful ways, OK I hear you say what’s the problem, well what if the ‘complainent’ or ‘reviewer’ is a competitor hell bent on destroying a competitors good name? Or maybe a disgruntled customer or client who received a satisfactory service or product, but now for reasons only they truly no, decide to make untrue allegations? Surely all websites clarify or request that firstly the reviewer is a genuine client of company x? No so, in fact the Internet is littered with many forums, and websites which allegedly offer you a chance to voice your opinion on services and products and do little if nothing at all to uphold and complaints a company or individual for that matter may receive unfairly to the detriment of their business.

So what’s the big deal? Well how do you or can you trust reviews on the web today? is not this a very counter productive and insidious digital rot being allowed to erode the very ethos and structure of a particularly good section of the web? Of course on site testimonials are worth nothing in my view as they could simply be made up by site owners.

Just as the ‘real world’ has standards over such issues as libel, defamation, and factual accuracy, so the web has, however many feel that they can post inaccurate comments with impunity, not so I am afraid, the same laws apply to the web as any other form of media, clearly education and sadly legal avenues of well covered cases will help to ‘clean up’, however much of the accuracy must be placed with the website holders, after all they probably have some form of financial remuneration from either ads or similar and are responsible to ensure their postings are accurate and offer respondents the chance to reply and re-but any inaccuracies.

So are all reviews misleading? Absolutely not, there are many very good sites which offer honest comments which allow consumers to make informed choices about their purchase decisions, I think when looking at a review website here are a few areas which should be considered;

How old is the review site? Is it a Government or large organization based company? Can and do companies reply to any comments made good or bad?

Additionally to this you may want to contact any company direct and get their take on the comments, perhaps there are genuine issues, or maybe there has been a genuine misunderstanding, I phone call or email may help you decide.