A friend of mine, Duff, has started a new site for posting and sharing reviews of anything, called Soapbox. It’s a very slick site built by one person (with the help of a designer that I’ve also worked with, Rich at Samedis Design). The basic idea is that you can write reviews and build a network of people whose reviews you care about.
One interesting aspect of the site is its attempt to make the service useful to bloggers. One problem I have with social networking sites is that I already have enough places to write about things. I have this blog, my link blog, and my Vox blog. There’s also del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, comments on blogs that I read, the mailing list I share with my college friends, all of the message boards I’m registered for, and probably a bunch more sites that I’m forgetting.
Lots of people already post reviews on their blogs. Soapbox will subscribe to your blog’s feed and import any appropriately tagged posts as reviews. I think that’s a pretty clever approach. If you already have a blog, you can participate on Soapbox without reposting all of your reviews over there.
If you want to read more behind the scenes stuff from Soapbox, check out Duff’s blog.