In the midst of countless reviews sites ranging from Yelp and Judy’s Book, to All Consuming and RateItAll, comes The Best Stuff in the World, a mega-reviews site that lets users pontificate on what the best stuff in the world is. So, does TBSW have a chance in this already crowded space? I think it does.

The key to TBSW is that it focuses on the “best.” Even though many of the other sites do focus on the rankings and dividing the wheat from the chaff, TBSW has the advantage that they’re only focused on the absolute wheatiest. This focus permeates all parts of the site, where the phrase “The Best XXX” is used liberally, and as a precursor (and postcursor) to almost all statements. For anyone who is too impatient to wade through multiple reviews, TBSW could be a shortcut to simple find what people think are the best in each category.

As a reviews and ranking site, TBSW’s implementation is simple and well-thought out–no suprises here. You can view each item, see other user’s comments, propose a “best” item, propose new categories for items, add images, bookmark them, and see who else likes the item. What’s interesting is that since items can be categorized into multiple categories, you can surf through from item to item, looking at what’s better. For example, Wikipedia may be ranked as a better website than Flickr, but Flickr may be ranked as a better Web 2.0 website than Wikipedia. I think that after a while, the six degrees of separation rule would come into effect, allowing me to surf from Flickr to Chanel Sunglasses by finding things that are better. It could potentially be an interesting way to surf related items that are naturally connected via categories.

Of course, just like any other social reviews site, there is the possibility of gaming the system to artificially inflate items. Right now, there appears to be no captcha or any human authentication involved in submission, so bots could easily be used to attack the service. However, there appears to not be any misbehavior so far (besides the usual silliness like saying “Anything” is the best in the world), and there also seems to be quite a few members that are already addicted to submitting their best items.

Again, TBSW has the advantage of simplicity in the complex world of reviews and ranking sites. If they keep the user influx up, their site could be a good resource for novices to find the best in any category.

POPjisyo is a useful application that adds pop-up dictionary capabilities to any site. It’s mainly targeted at Asian audiences whose English may be a little shaky, and who would benefit from a few helpful translations on websites. The service does this by acting as a proxy through which you browse the web. POPjisyo appends a bit of javascript to the page that adds a mouse hovering pop-up to all words with a translation.

Obviously, the pages load a bit slower than before, due to the numerous javascript tags that need to be placed around each word on the page. But, if it helps me understand the text better, I don’t really care about the extra load time. The key advantage that POPjisyo has is that it’s unobtrusive–if you need a definition for a word, simply hover your mouse over it. If you don’t need it, the extra pop-up doesn’t bother you. It’s a great design for novices that are beginning to get a foothold in a new language. This is unlike other services like Google’s Language Tools, which translates the whole page (most of the time, with many errors), which leaves the language student to their own devices to match up the words between the untranslated and translated page.

Apps like these are literally closing in on the language barrier, allowing people to derive value from pages that would otherwise be too difficult to read through. They currently support English to Japanese, Chinese, Korean. Also, they have an English dictionary and English computer dictionary, which will pop up dictionary terms on the fly. They even have a matching game where they pick off random words from the page, and you have to match the English terms to their Asian language counterparts–great for learning a language within the context of real reading material.

I would love to hear about your experiences with POPjisyo if you’re a regular user, and how it helps you out on a daily basis. Also, comment if you know of any other apps that provide language translation services that are equally easy to use.

What I would like to see is a reverse translation for Asian languages to English. It would be nice to finally be able to read and understand the Far East side of the web.

There’s certainly been a lot of blog searching buzz in the past few days, including announcements of new features from the big dogs like Bloglines and Technorati. Among the buzz is the newly launched, Australian based gnoos, which is trying to break into the blog searching world with a slightly different angle.

Their interface is as clean and sleek as their response time is quick. These are key factors in persuading users to return to your site time and time again. Michael mentioned that he would be able to spend quite some time on gnoos without being fatigued, and I whole-heartedly agree with him. There’s just something pleasant about the design decisions that were made for gnoos’s front end.

Some of the differentiating features include the ability to tag, rank, comment, and show the text of each blog post result. The first three features are similar to swicki’s social search aspects, the difference being that gnoos isn’t necessarily tied to a specific site, and is more of a general purpose blog search. Technorati could learn a thing or two about the type of community search that gnoos is bringing to the table via user interaction with search results.

The fourth feature is gnoos’s ability to pull up a blog post when clicking on the “more” link. The entire blog post is shown inline with the search results. Depending on who you’re speaking to, this could be a blessing, or a wolf in disguise. gnoos is allowing visitors to view blog content without visiting the blog or RSS feed. For sensitive content producers, this could be controversial, either due to financial or copyright concerns. gnoos does have a copyright policy in their Terms of Use page, where they say that they

will never knowingly infringe (or be involved in infringing) the intellectual property rights of others.

In addition, gnoos might run up against the same wall as Google did with their page caching, where private posts that were deleted might be easily recovered. Hopefully gnoos won’t ever have to deal with privacy and copyright issues. Personally, I don’t mind my posts being on 3rd party search engines. The way I see it, the more exposure my content gets, the better.

Perhaps the most interesting tactic that gnoos is bringing to the table is localization. gnoos is heavily localized to Australia, and shows it by allowing visitors to filter by “Aussie Blogs” and “Aussie Media.” I find that localization is something that has been overlooked by many startups, and indeed, it is the secret weapon that gnoos has to gain significant market share in Australia. What would be cool is for gnoos to take the lead in localization and start localizing blogs for other parts of the world. However, I doubt that this is their strategy.

Currently, the content on gnoos is much smaller than Technorati. Their fast querying speed may be a result of their small database. If this is the case, we’ll have to see how well they scale up as they index more of the blogosphere.

Good luck to the underdogs!

Simple web services that are easy to use is something that we all take for granted. A lot of apps out there try to do too much, and end up not doing much at all for many users. Montastic, a website monitoring service, is not one of these apps.

I’ve been using Montastic ever since the launch of BuzzShout, and it’s definitely a reliable tool that just works. You simply add the website that you want monitored, and it will ping it (with the minimum interval being 10 minutes), and will alert you via RSS, email, or Yahoo Widget with the status of your site. I’ve found it a lifesaver of a tool during the times when one of DreamHost’s servers go down–I’m usually the first to alert them about it when I see the Montastic status.

And, that’s about all the functionality that Montastic brings to the table. The key is they do it, and they do it well. The service is totally free, and the people behind Montastic, Metadot, actually rely on the service themselves for their sites. The effort behind Montastic is all done in goodwill and in the spirit of sharing useful applications, which is a breath of fresh air amidst other apps that only jockey their position for financial gain.

Montastic is built with Ruby on Rails and AJAX.