Amazon.com looks at each submitted review before posting it on the
website.  The "Fine Print" on each review submission page states:

        •       All submitted reviews are subject to the license terms set forth in
our Conditions of Use.
        •       Your reviews will be posted within five to seven business days.
        •       Submissions that do not follow our review guidelines will not be
posted.

Of course there are many options for how the review process is handled.
  For example, reviews can be passed through a naughty words filter to
auto-reject content that is objectionable.  Or it can auto-flag review
content that then gets reviewed by a staff person.

Or you could have a staff person scan though submitted reviews to
"check off" those that pass a subjective quality test.  How quality is
defined will depend on the context.  I have seen many poorly written
reviews appear on Amazon.com.  It's possible that their quality
threshold is very low (democratic?), or someone's asleep at the wheel.

Another approach to quality control of submitted content (such as
reviews) is to have the community of users involved in the process.
Amazon.com does this by asking its customers "Was this review helpful
to you?" under each review.  This data point can be used to sort the
display of reviews from most to least useful.  It can also be used to
suppress reviews that fall a given quality threshold.  My impression is
that you need a very large user base to make this sort of thing work.
One benefit of this approach is that it can potentially reduce the load
on staff in terms of reviewing content.

The automated vs staff vs community based approaches are not mutually
exclusive.  They can be used in combination depending on the need.

Finally I would say that if you're going to collect user submissions,
you probably should have some statement that speaks to the ownership of
the content.  Amazon.com handles this by stating in their Conditions of
Use document: "If you do post content or submit material, and unless we
indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a
nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully
sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish,
translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such
content throughout the world in any media".  Talk about covering your
bases!

Tito Sierra
Digital Library Initiatives
North Carolina State University

On Jan 26, 2004, at 4:36 PM, Brent Ferguson wrote:

> Everyone...
>
> I've thought about doing this many times...but I have always been
> worried about the opinions that people may express in their
> reviews/postings (bad words, innuendo etc.)...I have no idea how
> places like Amazon deal with this...
>
> If I remember correctly ISP's are not responsible for what people post
> to their hosted blogs, groups etc.
>
> Would it be a good idea to have staff review every posting before it
> goes live?
>
> Is this a problem that needs to be considered or just legal paranoia?
>
> Brent Ferguson
> Webmaster / Elkhart Public Library
> http://www.elkhart.lib.in.us
>
>