I'm excited to announce a new series on our blog: ZSA Loves.
These won't be reviews of the latest and greatest products on the market. Instead, we'll be focusing on tried and true products that we've been using for a while and continue to enjoy. This might include books we keep coming back to, games we play again and again, or any other product that we think is worth sharing. For obvious reasons, we won't be covering any computer keyboards. ;) Pretty much anything else is fair game, from coffee gear to shoes to games.
It's also important to mention that we don't receive any affiliate revenue or pay for these reviews. In fact, we won't even be including links to the products we review, for this exact reason. If you like a product we mention, you can Google it.
I'll be writing the first few posts in this series, but I'm more than happy to accept contributions. If you have a product you'd like to review, shoot me an email at [email protected]. Please note that we won't be paying for reviews, this is just for fun!
Doesn't the Internet have enough reviews already?
It would seem that way, until you dig in.
There are more than enough paid reviews. Reviews that are really sponsored content. Reviews that are full of affiliate links.
Or reviews on other platforms, boiling down nuance into a star-rating which can then be gamed (all on someone else’s walled garden and online empire, not on the open Web).
Then the other problem is how weighted everything is towards the latest, rather than the greatest. For every new shade of iPad that comes out, you’ll find thousands of breathless reviews. But what about fantastic products that aren’t that new?
Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools used to be great for this. But, guess what: Now every product they recommend is linked using affiliate links.
So if we’re talking about honest, thoughtful, passionate, reasoned reviews that aren’t motivated by affiliate revenue — no, I don’t think there are enough of those.
