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Codebreaker

Zappos solves the problem of ugly looking comments and reviews

John Moe Apr 28, 2011

Punctuation and capitalization are quickly thrown overboard when people post comments or customer reviews on web sites. But online shoe store Zappos sees no reason why a review of a pair of shoes needs to induce migraines for copy editors. They’ve started using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service to copy edit customer reviews. People are paid a few cents on the micro-employment site to fix misspellings, apply commas where they need to go, and actually hit that shift button (it’s not that hard) to make the reviews easier to read. It should be noted, of course, that Zappos was recently purchased by Amazon.

But! I think this isn’t just a Zappos thing. I just went to Amazon and looked at reviews of a Star Wars box set and found every review to be perfect, an AP style book dream. I think Amazon is applying this same service to its own reviews as well.

Not for every product, though. Here’s a Limp Bizkit review:

WOW! to the haters wow for real but this is one of the best hard rock rap blended cd ever if not the best for real and LIMP BIZKIT is my favorite rock band and always will…the lineup of the band is so incredible i cant even say much more…i am just disgusted by the people hating for real!!!!!!!need to re-buy all my limp albums…till next review of mine limp will never die in my stereo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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