You ask some tough questions - ill do my best to answer. 1) the incentive.. to be nice person and help other people out, and possibly appeal to people's desire

You ask some tough questions - ill do my best to answer. 1) the incentive.. to be nice person and help other people out, and possibly appeal to people's desire to give advice and be listened too? Maybe having accounts, and public "status" (ala stackoverflow) might help incentivize use? I was tossing around the idea of adding tags/categories - and using some metric to designate the "mayor" (ala foursquare) of that category/tag and then people that are very active could be "candidates" or something .. i dont know about the terminology, but something to highlight active/respected (have to figure out how to compute what "respected" is) users. 2) My personal experience is consumer reviews are the best reviews. Be it amazons/newegg's product reviews, or forums. "Commercial" review sites can be good (Toms, etc.) but its difficult to get a comparison review between products. You generally have to do a bit of leg work because most of these reviews aren't juxtaposing several products saying which one is better, and also so much of the choices depend on the particulars of your situation. Sure, you can eventually figure out what the best option for you is, but it can, and often does, take a long time to do. Alot of the time I just want well informed people in a particular niche to take a glance at my general situation and say "This is the best option for you"