Amazon's most influential reviewer outed

Good point ihavcpu.
Plus what local library allows people to put in discs? and who still uses discs for small files? is disc short for 'flashdrive'? 
Here's what the article says:
"He does not own a television or have an internet connection at home"
So it seems Mr Farrell took liberties making that 'no computer'

if he doesn't even own a computer, how does he do his work at home and save it on a disk to take to the local library?

Well obviously he uses a mini magnet and writes binary directly to the disk. He has no job, he has plenty of time.

>So it seems Mr Farrell

has been outed !

We know how internet is...
This folk probably doesn't have a computer, an internet connection, a cd player, a tape, a phonograph, a gramophone, a radio, an ID, or a gallbladder.
He might as be 13 years old, but that doesn't matter, in the cyberspace you can be whatever you want, and you can review things you've never seen or heard, or maybe never even heard of...
The web is great.

Anyone is entitled to their own opinion, but when that opinion is considered a REFERENCE to a product... would it not be a smart thing to make sure the reviewer has some related qualification/experience?

To me this just discredit's amazon's reviews.

I suggest amazon only allow customers that purchased a product to review that product.
All other reviews might be best left with professionals and or industry people.

It could be that he is using a typewriter with word processing with a floppy drive that saves files out in plain-text or limited RTF format.

it was just a typo like that common on the Inq- not a word but a whole sentence being wrong. Its not that that the guy is lacking in the computers department, he has a computer- but has no Internet connection. The author did link his source...

Although I don't understand how this guy can afford to buy 5,000 "older recordings" whatever that may be and then write reviews about them. Is it just consumerism taken to an extreme? Unpaid work?

Good for him! I like reading articles like this. Poor guy found something enjoyable and it has impacted people's buying decisions! Goes to show one person can make a difference, regardless of how people want to look at it. Awesome.

I think we're all forgetting how bad ass typewriters got in the end. They could save to floppy.

Personally, I treat reviews just like Wikipedia : can be entertaining, but has no real value.
It should have value, but unfortunately the pretense is flawed from the start. Anyone can review anything - even if they haven't laid their eyes on it.
So sorry, but although user-reviews should really be THE reference, just like every other good idea on the Web, it has long been denatured and rendered useless by the morons who think their opinion is worth more than their (lack of) experience.

If I ever believed anything I read in newspapers, I don't now. This article has so many errors it'd take forever to go through them all.

I own a computer but I lost my internet connection when I ran into debt. For a time I copied to floppy and loaded stuff to the internet via the library. My floppy drive failed eventually so that option closed. But by then I already had enough reviews to ensure I stayed at #1 in the UK for a long time to come. I still write reviews at home and hope to post them in 2008 when I restore my internet connection at home. I occasionally edit old reviews for new products and these account for some of the reviews appearing in the last couple of years. Others are copied from old USA reviews.

I should point out that the old USA reviews that I mentioned were my own old reviews. I post my reviews in Britain and America where possible, but some products are listed only in one country or the other. In some cases, the other country adds it to their catalog at a later date, sometimes years later. I don't keep track of what's posted where but I sometimes stumble across products wheere I've only posted a review in one place and realize that I can now post it in the other, so I do.

The figure of 5,000 is arrived at by adding up my UK and USA reviews. Despite some catalog differences described above, the true figure is not much more than 2,500 (actually it may be 2,600 or 2,700 but certainly no more). As to how I accumulated all this material, well, I bought most of it when I had loads of money. These days, I look for bargains and I also borrow from the library or wherever. 

One of the joys of reviewing on Amazon is being able to review just about anything, even if it's decades old and long out of print. I've started reviewing vinyl LP's that have never been released on CD, just for the fun of it.

Occasionally, I am supplied with review copies. Actually, I decline most of the stuff I'm offered that way because it doesn't interest me.

Since my own floppy drive failed, the library has upgraded its computers, but if my floppy drive worked I could load them up using an internet cafe. I don't use them very often because they cost money, but they're useful occasionally.