Reviews are grist for gist site

As much as those of us in the opinion business like to think that what we write about a new product is the be-all and end-all on it, from a consumer's point of view, it makes more sense to taste the water from more than one well before committing to a purchase. The trick, however, is not to drown in information in the process. That's where Reviewgist comes in. The recently revamped service scours a universe of "trusted" web sites for reviews on a panoply of products--including digital cameras--and using its "patent pending deep semantic analysis engine" crunches the opinions in those reviews to rate the products. A nifty feature of the site is its new comparison interface. Not only does it compare products side-by-side, but when you roll your cursor over the bars in an item's rating graph, excerpts from reviews appear beside the comparison chart. So if you touch the "image" bar in a camera rating, for instance, quotes relative to imaging extracted from reviews on the product will pop up on the screen. Reviewgist is still billing itself as a beta site, and its product database seems a bit underpopulated at the moment, but it's still worth a looksee.