Epinions, the grand pa of review sites, went social and could provide an amazing opportunity for niche marketers to build authority and gain closely-targeted visitors. Epinions now has social networking profiles and offers the ability to put up a web of trust (i.e. Pals) with other reviewers in your niche. I am not recommending doing affiliate promotion and dropping links on Epinions at all! (Associate links are taboo).
What I'm analysis is if you have a baby site and did regular reviews about baby products, you could built up your web of trust (who would be other elders), build yourself as a pro in the field, build a following to your baby site and perhaps even generate some good traffic. Just look one of the top Epinions reviewers. He's had over 3.9 millions visits to his reviews and has 415 pals that trust him. Note that he is a lead reviewer in the car class, and has a link to his homepage an auto related site.
Also he is pretty smart in that he's will link to his site in his profile outline, which shows up as a live link in the most up to date writers list and goes direct to his site. Additionally, scroll down his private page to see the long bio, copter view of his site and additional links to it. He's used Epinions to raise his authority standing in his selected niche.
