I had this idea about a year ago. I am filing it under things I'll never continue working on.
Among the areas that made this less appealing were competitors and I think that I was going to mainly copy a site that focused on doing this for books called allconsuming.com

Hypercrit – thoughts

Mission: To create the largest independent online rating system for media and high-tech products for the community of bloggers.

The system will need to have a source data set of items that can be critiqued. To begin with it can be a basic database of items like any publicly available database of movies or even a way to allow people to find an item on Amazon and import the item.

The business model is that there are many companies today that have a large inventory/database of products that seek increased mind-share among consumers. These companies include online merchants such as Amazon.com, Netflix, and itunes as well as content providers connected to the specific industries like CNET for hardware. This list could also be expanded to organizations like comparison shopping engines like PriceGrabber and Froogle. Many of these organizations thus far have mainly built their own rating and recommendation engines into their systems.

This is fine but may not be the model preferred by bloggers to rate and recommend products because the content does not result in information included into their blog. By creating a blogger friendly tool for publishing ratings to individual blogs that includes their promotional objectives a business model can be reached that allows bloggers to achieve affiliate revenue or credits from these companies for driving traffic and it allows the online merchants to drive increased consumption through them as a channel. The central hub for opinions can also be a source to drive increased mind-share for the vendors.

In order to get the blogging community interested in a tool existing blogs with strong influence could be targeted directly as well as the major blogging tools (Movable Type, blogger, etc.) Specific early champions of the tool would be critical in the process.

Constituents

Bloggers:

• Publish reviews and ratings of products
• Improve look and feel of blog entries for ratings/reviews
• Simplify the process of publishing or re-publishing ratings
• Drive increased blog traffic through active rating
• Have ratings included in a central repository
• Link to other blogger opinions
• Find other bloggers with similar opinions
• Achieve affiliate revenue/credits from vendors

Merchants:

• Sell more products
• Increase traffic on specific items
• Syndicate relevant blog content
• Achieve new affiliate revenue from actively publishing bloggers
• Increase sales within blogger communities

Comparison shopping sites/publishers:

• Increase traffic
• Achieve new affiliates from actively publishing bloggers
• Add relevant content from syndicated blogs

Non-blogger consumers:

• Quickly obtain reviews
• Learn more about reviewers through blog entries
• Quickly link to products for use or from merchants from blog entries (e.g. add to Netflix queue, get showtimes, compare prices, etc.)

Content producers (media companies – movie makers, book publishers, etc.)

• Drive increased consumption of listed media
• Achieve faster time to market for new media items
• Access the influential independent “blogger” press

Competitors