Online Reviews…Over the Phone?

Call Me Ishmael

As we all are relatively well aware, online reviews are rapidly on the rise. Be it Yelp, Citysearch, Amazon, Google+, you name it; online reviews are here to stay.

But is there such thing as online reviews..over the phone? Online reviews, over the phone that are…somehow, still online?

Enter Call Me Ishmael.

Call Me Ishmael is a website that gathers and publishes one- to three-minute voice-recorded book reviews from anonymous contributors recorded via telephone and selects one story to post to the site each day.

So it’s like the SparkNotes of..online book reviews. Yeah, something like that.

One of the downsides of the site, however, is that it doesn’t index the text of the reviews. So that factor could possibly cause it to be less pervasive in disrupting the online book review space.

What’s also interesting is what seems to be a shift away from reading, however. Ironic, considering this is a post about reviewing books. But what we mean by that is, the fact that even though these reviews are over the phone, being a seasoned medium, while also still being online, shows a glorious melding of two mediums that both do not involve any actual reading. (With the exception of reading the book that one is leaving the review about.)

Anyway, it just goes to show how the online review-scape is continuously evolving in new ways and even ways that accommodate components of the past.