A few weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t want to buy something icky, either.

So I stood in front of the bank of sparkling wines offered by my favorite wine shop and considered my choices.

It happened that two other women were there, also shopping for champagne. They were apparently friends, and having a lively conversation, recalling different wineries they’d visited. After eavesdropping on them as they discussed four or five different bottles, I decided, on impulse, to consult with them.

I’d picked up a bottle of Konstantine Frank sparkling wine (which interested me because it’s an Upstate New York State vitner) and asked them if they were familiar with it, and whether it was any good.

They were gracious from the start, but also, at first, cautious. The reason soon became clear: they didn’t want to recommend something without knowing a bit about my taste. So wisely, they asked me which of the wines I did like. I pointed to the Veuve Clicquot, heh. “This, only I’d rather not spend quite that much.” And at that point, they relaxed. “Oh,” they said. Now they could help me. They knew my taste was close enough to theirs.

And they recommended a $20 Roederer Estate Brut sparkling wine.

I took it home, chilled it, opened it later that night, and was thrilled. It was delicious — at that price, perfect, in fact.

Which brings me to this 12,000-word article (excuse me, “paper”) at First Monday (tagline: “Peer-reviewed journal on the internet”).

The paper proposes to examine the scandalous behavior of on-line user reviews, with a focus on Amazon book reviews.

First, we have the reviews that are blatant plants. The article authors (Shay David and Trevor Pinch) remind us that

in 2004 both the New York Times (Harmon, 2004) and the Washington Post (Marcus, 2004) reported that a technical fault on the Canadian division of Amazon.com exposed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers, and alarming discoveries were made. It was established that a large number of authors had “gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals.” A few had even “reviewed” their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.

(The authors don’t realize how oh-so 2004 this particular scandal is. Today’s writers are urged, quite blatantly, by their handlers to call in every favor owed them since they left the cradle in exchange for glowing Amazon reviews.)

Next comes the point that many Amazon reviews are essentially spam. The text is copied from one review to another — outright plagiarism is involved in some cases — and often the review is merely a clever pretext for publicizing a website URL. (Rather like the spammers who pretend they love my blog as a pretext for adding their business site url to my comments. Yeah, that’ll work.)

Other reviews are falsely flattering: reviewers give books five stars in order to raise their own reviewer standing. Still others are obviously written more to satisfy a reviewer’s emotional needs than to provide information about a book. (Ya, no kidding.)

And then (worst of all! :-D) are the reviews that are simply crap.

What the paper’s authors don’t consider is whether anyone really takes online user reviews seriously.

I bet not. I bet most people — like me — read Amazon reviews (if at all) for the entertainment value, not to help them make purchase decisions.

It’s simple human nature. In most cases, we take advice from people whose judgement we decide we can trust — a common sense criteria that de facto excludes anonymous online reviews.

That’s not to say we have to know the person giving the advice, but we have to know something about them. Perhaps we’ve observed that they seem engaged and knowledgeable — like the two women I met in the wine shop. A well-written review in a print publication can fall into that category, even if the reviewer’s name is unfamiliar.

Maybe it’s someone with whom we simply identify — a blogger we read, or Oprah, or someone we know from work.

But taking advice from anonymous people on the ‘net?

Maybe some of us do that, once or twice. But I’m betting that people who do quickly learn how useless that advice can be.

And here’s the thing. Even if you do buy a book based on a bogus review, that’s the end of the chain, right there. You’re not going to recommend that book yourself.

So although the Internet can be a medium for word-of-mouth, it’s a foolish marketer who thinks a post on the Internet is equivalent to word-of-mouth.

The real chain is, and always has been, trust.

Or to put another way: the number of Amazon reviews is as much (maybe more) the result of a book’s popularity as the cause of it.