There's not much to argue against the steady and significant rise in use and significance of review sites like Yelp, Praized, etc. People like getting non-biased opinion from other "regular" people when they are looking to spend their money.

As an aside: What does this say about the much ballyhooed impartiality of the press of the world? When the common man no longer unthinkingly eats the pablum served up by the press, especially when the common man is looking to spend his money, what does that say about the public's perception of the so called "church and state" separation between the advertising and news departments?

The review section on the Google Local Business Center has a serious affect on your sites ranking there. Google is recognizing, responding to and supporting this major change by rewarding businesses that have reviews with better search engine positioning. But what is the result of this change and how will it affect SEO?

A more recent phenomenon is the way people are using and relying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook to get informed opinion on everything they might be looking for information on. I think we have to face the fact that crowd-sourcing is growing like crazy.

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing has just written an article, Will Customer Opinion Overtake Search? discussing the effect of the newly launched Social Search services that all the search engines have just started up.

He brings up some thought provoking ramifications of what happens if social search and reviews keep growing in the manner that they have been.

What questions does this raise for you?