New Category: Dishwashers

Photo originally uploaded to Flickr by Independentman.

In our effort to be an all-purpose shopping research resource (say that 10 times fast!), we’re always making decisions about which product categories to add next. The handful of categories with which we launched the site a few months back were determined based largely on areas that our research showed to be especially lacking in easy-to-find and digest sources of good, independent information.

Now that we have visitors to the site and tools for seeing where they’re spending their time, we can direct our efforts to the areas where our users are showing the most interest. One of those area is home appliances. And so we’ve added dishwashers to the mix, starting off with five great machines across all four of our price categories, with more on the way.

Office Printers: Because We’re Still Waiting for the Paperless Office

Remember the concept of the paperless office? Well, we’re not sure about you, but it has yet to arrive here at the Consensus Best HQ. Until it does, you may want to check out our newest category of recommendations: printers for the home- and small-to-medium size office. Happy printing!

Winner of the _______ Award!

“Best product” awards are like Boy Scout merit badges – sooner or later everybody gets at least one to sew on their chest for all to see. But, unlike a Boy Scout, it’s not always clear that these products have really earned these distinctions or even that the “distinction” is worth having in the first place.

Most of us are familiar with this one . It’s the J.D. Power and Associates Award and we’ve seen it so often associated with products that we know are good that it’s become a pretty reliable and authoritative symbol of quality.

Similarly, when they see this or this , most seasoned electronics junkies know that the CNET Editor’s Choice Award or PC Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Award means you’re looking at a top digital camera or laptop.

But what about this ? It may be less familiar, but does that mean that it’s less trustworthy. On the flip side of that question, just because it looks respectable and a manufacturer slaps it on an ad or their Web site, does that mean we should put any faith in it?

Well, from a marketer’s perspective, if you have to stop and think about these questions, then these awards haven’t done their job. But what about the consumer’s perspective? You can be dismissive of them or trust that they have some merit. But in both cases, making an uninformed decision may come at a cost.

So central to our research is investigating not just the product review and the awards it’s won, but the sources behind those opinions and distinctions. For example, we learned that Buyer’s Laboratory Inc. is, in fact, a respected source of business equipment information based on its extensive real-world tests.

We won’t ever trust an award, even from the best sources, to tell the whole story on a product, but one from the likes of  a Cnet or a Buyer’s Laboratory certainly helps determine what’s best.

But there are other “best of” awards that give us pause. Often it’s an unfamiliar source that lacks a clear statement about their independence or lack thereof and gives few, if any, details on their researchers or their methods and sources. They may have fancy looking awards that they bestow on products, but if we can’t tell — even after much effort — what their case is for doing so, you can be sure that they mean nothing to us and will carry no weight in our recommendations.

Get the Latest, Greatest Product Recommendations Automatically with our RSS Feed.

Look for this RSS (Really Simple Syndication) at the bottom of any category page and use it to subscribe to that page. Be notified of new products and/or whole categories automatically, without having to check in at consensusbest.com. New to RSS? Sign up for one of the free online readers (My Yahoo!, Google Reader, or Rojo, to name a few), and then subscribe to any site offering an RSS feed.

As the name says, RSS feeds are super simple to subscribe to and manage and, consistent with our goal of saving you time, they allow you to make the most efficient use of yours by letting you automatically see only the freshest information of your choosing.

If you spend much time at all online, you’ve surely seen this or other similar symbols on news sites and blogs. If not, or to just learn more, read this.

On Doing the Research for You

The Internet is great, right? It brings you tons of information that you never had access to before. But who’s gonna sift through it all? Our idea for the ton of product information out there is to save you time by doing the homework for you.

The same idea applied to stock research resulted in Footnoted.org, where Michelle Leder digs through SEC filings to find nuggets of information that will help you decide when to buy or sell a stock. Sure, you can access the same documents at sec.gov. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you’d want to. And thanks to sites like Footnoted, you don’t have to (via Wallstrip).

Critcal Metrics: A “ConsensusBest of Music”

This is cool. Criticalmetrics.com is a site that takes the same approach as ConsensusBest.com and applies it to music. Basically, they look at the best sources of music criticism — everything from Rollingstone and the AP to Pitchfork and The Fader — and come up with the songs that are common to everyone’s “best” list. From the site:

Critical Metrics filters all recommendations and all reviews ranked four stars or greater during the selected time period, displaying the most highly rated, diversely recommended, broadly circulated and recent results first.

You can set your own filters for your favorite critics and make and share playlists. Check out a short playlist we made. Happy listening!

For Love or Money?

Pete Cashmore over at Mashable has a write-up on USuggest.com, a new social shopping site that cuts users in on affiliate fees when someone makes a purchase based on their product recommendations. Like everything in the Web 2.0 space, social shopping sites are launching at a furious pace, and letting people profit from their efforts seems reasonable and a good way to help distinguish yourself. Or is it?

I’ve only taken a quick glance at USuggest, so this isn’t really about them in particular. But in the study organizational behavior, there’s a widely accepted dynamic that suggests that something that someone enjoys doing as a volunteer suddenly and perhaps not surprisingly starts to feel like work as soon as it becomes a paid effort.

If anyone’s going to profit off these sites, that group might as well include their users. But one of the unresolved issues here and with other community-oriented sites (think of people who Digg for nothing versus those who are paid to do the same thing –submit interesting news items –for Netscape) is the tension between doing something for the joy and help it provides to a fellow member of the community versus doing it to generate an income, even if it’s just pocket change.

Check Out Our Co-op

by Jared Benedict. Used by permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Happy New Year!

For 2007, we’re looking forward to building out the site with ever more product categories. In addition, we also have plans for making the information on our site more useful and accessible (for example, RSS feeds that will let you subscribe automatically to site updates will be coming any day now). Along those lines, we’ve taken advantage of Google’s new(ish) Co-op service to create a custom ConsensusBest search engine, or what we prefer to call out “Re”search engine.

Here at ConsensusBest, our whole point is to save you time by exhaustively researching all the most trusted sources of product reviews and information so that you don’t have to. But many of you naturally want to dig deeper and see the information for yourselves. Toward that end, we already include links to a sampling of sources in each category’s “criteria and research” section.

And now we’ve assembled this custom search engine. So what does it do? Well, consistent with our theme, it saves you time by returning search results only from sites that are trusted sources of consumer product information. For example, compare the results for the search term “baby stroller” on Google’s main site, where the top results are all commerce sites versus the ones here on our Co-op site where the results are all independent reviews. We hope it will prove to be a useful addition to our site and, if it is, we’ll look to include it on the homepage.

In the meantime, we’ll be judiciously adding sites to the engine and encourage you to do the same. Have a favorite review or recommendation site that we’re missing? Let us know about it by clicking on the “contribute” link on the ConsensusBest Custome “Re”search Engine homepage. And thanks for your help.

Happy Holidays!

With less than three shopping days left until Christmas, the time savings that ConsensusBest.com can offer the harried, last-minute shopper are greater than ever (we speak here from personal experience ). And the value of our local store listings is most obvious now that all but a few online retailers have passed their “have-it-by-Christmas” ordering deadlines.

Hopefully, we can save you some time that will be better spent sharing the spirit of the season with friends and loved ones. For those who have been using the site, we’d love to hear any stories about how ConsensusBest may have helped make your holiday shopping a little easier this year. And, as always, we’d love to hear your suggestions on how to improve the site in the coming year at feedback@consensusbest.com.

Finally, we at ConsensusBest.com want to wish all of you Happy Holidays and all the best for a Happy and Healthy New Year!

New Product Category: Office Equipment & Furniture

We’ve kicked off our seventh category with six of the best desk chairs out there. Our list of consensus best recommendations includes chairs like the .04, above, and other examples of industrial design so sophisticated they belong in (and, in the case of the Herman Miller Aeron Chair, can indeed be fuond in) museums. The list also includes more practical (and affordable) examples of the latest trends in ergonomics. The average desk jockey might not give too much thought to their desk chair (unless it’s so bad that it gives them back aches). But switching to the right chair will make you wonder how you went so long without. Indeed, in the case of the Steelcase Leap, a University of Texas study showed that workers who used it increased their productivity by nearly 18 percent. So sit back and relax (as best you can in your current chair , anyway ) and check out our latest list of product recommendations.

In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be adding more chairs to this list and more lists to the new Office Equipment& Furniture category, so stay tuned.