One of the great things about shopping on Amazon is that you can read through dozens, if not hundreds of user reviews. While expert and editorial reviews can give you a sense of whether an item is worth the sale price, user reviews will let you know whether you should expect it to fall apart the moment you unpack the box.
But who has time to sift through hundreds of reviews when you just want someone to tell you whether you should buy this digital camera or that one? That's where Pluribo comes in. This Firefox add-on will read through the user reviews in certain product categories and present you with a concise summary.
The plugin uses some artificial intelligence so you don't wind up with short, choppy, and unreadable reviews. Don't expect Shakespeare, but Pluribo will give you enough information that you might not need to read the individual reviews.
Right now, Pluribo doesn't work with products in every category. For example, digitial cameras seem to be covered, but video cameras aren't.
BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.
Currently the service is limited to just 20 large metro areas, with more expected to be rolled out later on. If you're fortunate enough to live in one of those areas you can search for restaurants by your particular neighborhood, and sign up for an RSS feed for your area so you always know about the latest place in town.
Yelp lets customers write reviews of restaurants, shops, and all sorts of other businesses in communities throughout the country. And that's the sort of service that makes the site both incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous for business owners.
Now Yelp is giving business owners tools that let them keep a closer eye on the reviews their establishment is receiving. If you sign up for a Business Owner Account, you can track how many people view your business page, update your business profile, and send messages to people who have reviewed your business. In order to get a business owner account, you'll obviously need to verify that you actually run the business in question.
Of course, there's no guaranty that you'll be able to prevent people from writing that your food tastes stale or that your bathrooms are smelly unless you actual improve your food and clean your bathrooms. You know, unless those folks on the internet are lying. But that never happens.
Have you ever been so impressed with the coffee/beer/waitstaff somewhere that you wanted to tell the world? PlaceShout is a website designed to allow you to give your favorite places a little Internet shout out and help you find new places in your area that are worth a visit.
Traditional review sites that have lengthy reviews of establishments. But PlaceShout is all about brevity, with a maximum review length of 100 characters. You can navigate the site by searching for a particular item: For instance: "Coffee in San Francisco" or you can view areas by map and look for reputable establishments near you.
When you pull up a particular location's rap sheet you can see everything that has ever been said about them. Much like comments on Digg, comments on the site can be given a thumbs up or a thumbs down. A particular comments amount of votes determines what order it is seen on a places review sheet. For instance if someone says the grilled cheese at Earls Sandwich shop is the bomb, and you think its the worst thing to ever be put on sliced bread you can give their comment a thumbs down and move it down on the list.
PlaceShout is a relatively new kid on the block, so there's not an overwhelming amount of reviews out there to peruse for a lot of cities, you can currently add reviews however for anywhere. The cities with the most reviews are Ann Arbor, MI at 260 and San Francisco with 234.
If you want to check out reviews of places in your area some good similar sites to check out are JudysBook, InsiderPages, and Yelp.
What do you get when you mix a Digg-esque ranking scale, a Twitter-like SMS roll, and a focus on amplifying the public opinion? You get LouderVoice, a review-anything web site that seems to have caught on. Opinions aplenty abound here, so whether you're looking for more XBox fanboy ammo or just a recommendation on a skateboard to get to work (hey, I ride my skateboard to work--don't you?), LouderVoice indexes somebody's opinion on just about every subject.
LouderVoice gets its content in one of several ways--by aggregating reviews from blogs (which any blogger can take advantage of, a la Twitter), by pulling in a review you've posted on your MySpace page, or by allowing you to submit a review via SMS on your mobile device. Needless to say, SMS reviews are really short and often suffer from typically poor cellphone grammar.
So is LouderVoice worthwhile for review bloggers? Perhaps, as it may drive some traffic to your blog. But, at least to us, it looks like LouderVoice is gaming bloggers for free content in order to (someday) profit from product-specific Amazon sell-thrus. Not a bad business model, if the site becomes popular enough.
Wakoopa is a new social networking site that lets you connect with other users who have the same tastes in... software as you do. We know, you're more likely to bond with someone online because of your love/disdain of Radiohead than because you both happen to like Firefox and hate Internet Explorer. But there are some things that make Wakoopa worth a second look.
Here's how Wakoopa works. You download a program and let it scan your computer for installed software. This lets Wakoopa help create your online profile, but it also means that Wakoopa has a pretty intriguing database of usage stats.
In other words, you could find new software by browsing the user profiles of Wakoopa members who have similar tastes to your own. Or without even signing up you can just click on the site's software tab and see a scrolling banner of recently used software as well as a list of "most used software" with the number of Wakoopa members using each application.
Windows Vista is garnering some interesting reviews, but the latest from Forbes' Stephen Manes probably isn't going to get framed on Steve Ballmer's wall anytime soon (that could simply be due to a lack of space though). Stephen chose a fairly transparent title of "Dim Vista" for his review, setting the stage for a long list of usability gripes and tales of staggering un-wow-edness. Stephen finds problems in everything from the Windows Firewall not recognizing when a 3rd party firewall is active, the Control Panel being needlessly redesigned yet again and even WordPad no longer being able to open .DOC Word files. And that's all before he gets to the bugs, quirks and other broken pieces of this nearly 6-year venture.
While Stephen's review doesn't have a happy ending, it could serve as a cautionary tale for anyone still considering a move to Vista. At the very least, Stephen recommends waiting until Service Pack 1, and with the way things are shaping up, we're tending to agree.
Yesterday blogger Paul Bausch noticed that Amazon has added comments to reviews, meaning one Amazon customer can now leave a comment on a review that another customer wrote. This isn't especially interesting, except that it's almost a complete about-face from the policy Amazon has maintained as long as it's had reviews. Amazon has always actively discouraged reviewers from "replying" to other reviews or making reference to them in their own reviews. As Bausch astutely points out, "If people know that their reviews are "thread starters" rather than isolated posts, you could get more chatty reviews with open-ended questions designed to provoke discussion. You should also get more flame wars, more trolling, all of the standard online discussion problems." It's hard to tell how Amazon is going to deal with the imminent influx of comments, but if they can keep things relatively civil, I think it adds a lot of value for shoppers.
Another collaborative ratings site, Filmcrowd (beta), is born. Filmcrowd is, as you might guess from the name, focused
on movies. Gibbity, which you can't guess from the title, is more of a games
site, but uses the same social aspect. The two sites are from the same folks, in fact. Tags and collaboration are the
key here. For instance, you can create a focus group of sorts, with users who find certain movies in common as their
likes or dislikes. Keep tabs on the group, and what they're reviewing, and get suggestions. Filmcrowd is young, so
there aren't as many reviews as say, Amazon (that's a joke really, Amazon has a wee bit of a head start). My favorite
tag has to be crap, which contains such winners as Alone in the Dark
and The Postman.
John C. Dvorak's latest column is about Yelp, a new site that combines social networking a la Friendster to restaurant and
business reviews a la Epinions. If you're looking for a restaurant you can see what others have recommended and their
ratings, plus other places they've rated, what their friends have rated, and so on. As Dvorak says, "If it turns
out that a person likes Denny's and hates Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia, then that person is probably not someone who
would be great at suggesting fabulous French restaurants, but he might be good at finding a coffee shop." Apart
from restaurants, Yelp also includes categories for "Night Life," "Beauty and Spas,"
"Acitve Life," and more. Refreshingly, Yelp has some modern features like inline Google Maps and RSS feeds.
Unfortunately there's not a single Yelp-reviewed restaurant within 100 miles of me, but maybe if Yelp is able to reach
critical mass, that will change.
BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.
Yelp
Windows Vista is garnering some interesting reviews, but the latest from Forbes' Stephen Manes probably isn't going to get framed on Steve Ballmer's wall anytime soon (that could simply be due to a 
Another collaborative ratings site, 
