Wal-Mart now deigns to allow customer reviews! Must go down to the outer circles of Hell to see if it's beginning to freeze over yet...

Gaspedal founder and former prez ofWOMMA,wom-marketing maven Andy Sernovitz sees the good and the bad in the whole thing. For example...

The Good: "everything gets reviewed" which makes the "reviews go mainstream" and inadvertently turns Wal-Mart into "consumer activists" (eek!)

The Bad: while consumers rejoice, manufacturers and marketers ain't gonna "be able to cover for averageness with clever advertising" any more. Andy also suggests e-commerce sites get their acts together and get rating systems up, oh, sometime yesterday....

I'll be watching though to see if Wal-Mart engages in a bit of sock-puppetry...perhaps in having marketing employees post "good" reviews for lousy products. Then again, maybe they learned their lessons with last year's faux pas.