In March we released a significant new update to the site introducing a brand new feature we’re calling the ProSCORE.

This feature augments our ProCon system giving you a quick 5-second view on the product’s quality. We analyze the list and people’s opinions of the product’s pros and cons to determine if people think the product overall is: good, bad or in the middle.

On the product report page you’ll see an expanded prometer with more information. On the left is the ProSCORE itself, with the number of reviews considered listed underneath. Beside the ProSCORE is the ProMETER bar which gives an idea of what the ProSCORE number actually means.

From 0-39 is Negative Opinion | 40-60 is Mixed | 61-100 is Positive Opinion.

On the very right we list the breakdowns of the individual reviews themselves so you can get a more detailed idea of what people think of the product.

Review Tab

You can get an even more detailed picture of people’s thoughts with the launch of the new Reviews tab.

This feature continues to augment the ProCon system letting you see each person’s individual opinion and which Pros and Cons they’ve agreed with. We also pull in extra information such as the comments they’ve posted about the product and how they’ve voted on the competitors. You now have a centralized view for each person’s opinion.

Helpfulness and Approved Reviewers

Underneath each review you may have noticed a simple question: “Did you find this review helpful? Yes/No”

While seemingly simple, answering this question is actually very powerful. How helpful people find a particular review let’s the software determine 3 things:

1. How prominently we should feature the review. The more helpful, the more people that should see it
2. Should the reviewer be approved or not?
3. How prominently should we feature the reviewer? The more helpful, the more exposure the reviewer should get.

Being an approved reviewer means that your individual ProSCORE is counted in the product’s overall ProSCORE. People who are not approved, don’t have their scores counted. This is how the community can moderate the review scores and ensure that bias fanboys/trolls don’t muck up the counts for everyone else.

Top Reviewers

Also, for fun and to spur some competition we have a Top Reviewers leaderboard where we track and show-off the best reviewers on the site. The ranking is determined by the number of HELPFUL reviews you have substracted by the number of UNHELPFUL reviews.

HELPFUL – UNHELPFUL = Review Rank

Considering some people have been more active and been longer around than others we offer different leaderboards for fairness. The “All-Time” leaderboard is the most competitive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t rule the Monthly, or Yearly ranks.

Final Thoughts

This is a big update to the site and we really hope the community likes it. The goal of ProductWiki is to give people the essential information on products in a timly and concise manner that comes from the community. The ProSCORE really brings this out in a big way by giving you a lot of information in 5 seconds while still being controlled entirely by the community.

Let’s continue to redefine the standards.

The Toshiba32av502u32-inch720plcd

The Toshiba 32AV502U is a 31.5-inch, LCD television.Compared to other LCD TVs on the market, it is midpriced at around $550.This unit is an LCD display, which is generally the best kind of flat-panel screen for viewing in brightly-lit rooms.

I have had this product for about three weeks now, and so far I am very pleased with it. The picture, which I receive from an indoor/outdoor antenna is extremely crisp. I would recommend those of you out there pondering whether or not to get cable/satellite to consider simply installing a good antenna – that way there is no video compression, and you actually get a sharper image from the local networks. I honestly cannot tell the difference between my TV’s image as a 720p and my brother-law’s 47″ 1080p Sony.

The TV menu is easy to see and use. I keep my video settings on sports generally, as it is the brightest picture (some of the others, like “movie” are just too dark for me). However, you can also adjust the picture in preference mode, and play around with brightness, sharpness, contrast, backlight, color, and tint.

I also own a wii system, and even though it is not high definition like some other gaming systems, I have to say that the picture on this TV is excellent (especially with the wii component cables attached).

The sound on the TV is also very full – I did not notice any tinniness coming from the speakers at all, and it seemed well balanced between base and treble. It will obviously not produce the same depth of sound as a full sound system, but it suits my needs perfectly.

There is, as the other reviewer indicated a minor lag time when switching between inputs, but this really doesn’t bother me. One mildly annoying element however is that most of the inputs (HDMI, component cables (AKA color stream), PC inputs, S-Video, etc.) are on the back of the TV, which is a mild nuisance. The only exception to this is Video 2, which is on the side. (This would probably be good for connecting a digital camcorder and the like).

The only other thing that seems a little inconsistent is PC connectivity. When I hook up my laptop (I use an RGB computer video cable and audio cable since my computer doesn’t have a built in HDMI port) it is necessary for me to turn the laptop off, connect the cables and then reboot, or the image will not display on the TV. Perhaps this is a standard thing for most TVs – I don’t really know, having never owned an HDTV with PC inputs before. Also, the TV seems to project the computer screen a little differently each time the computer is hooked up, and I sometimed have to do a little tweaking to get an image I’m happy with. This may just require more trial-and-error on my part. Since my primary purpose is to use the TV as a TV screen and DVD player and not a computer screen, this isn’t a big deal to me.

On the whole, I am extremely satisfied with this purchase. It does its job well, displaying an excellent, non-pixelated image and it is even an energy star product, so it should save energy and money. There are other good deals on the market, but I really think that this is one of the best

The shopping world is run with faceted taxonomies. You know, the standard drill of choosing narrower and narrower categories, and then adding filters on things such as price, manufacturers and features. All of this navigation is powered and made possible through highly structured data with explicit relationships stored in a database or equivalent.

The data is structured, with hard links and concepts, that are also inflexible. If I want to create new attributes to filter by I have to modify the database, create new entries and establish the relationships. In reality what ends up happening is that taxonomy designers spend a lot of time at the beginning of development figuring out what is the best Hierarchical structure because they know it won’t get changed a lot in the future.

Now, what if you could accomplish the same drill-down and filtering use cases without storing hard database relationships?

It turns out that you can. With a BUT.

Main point: Text indexing is a superset of structured taxonomies.

Let me say that again…

TEXT INDEXING IS A SUPERSET OF STRUCTURED TAXONOMIES

Remember that a service like Google indexes everything. You can search every page against any character sequence. Well, if you place your taxonomy information on the page in a text format then it gets indexed just like everything else.

Taxonomy information.. indexed? Isn’t that the same as hard database relationships? EXACTLY! Without the database! Or rather, Google’s index IS the database.

Here’s the huge boost from this: If the search index is an isomorphism of your explicit taxonomy, then it’s also an isomorphism of unknown taxonomies that you haven’t even thought of.

As long as you put as much information as possible on the page then Google will index it, and voila every kind of taxonomy you can think of is created and buried inside the search index. What this means is that you can go back and create taxonomies without any loss of information!

In the structured approach if I wanted to be able to filter on HDTVs that have a 120Hz mode, I have to create a new facet called “Refresh Rate” and then go back and add the 120Hz attribute to all those televisions that apply.

In the unstructured approach I just write down in the text somewhere that the television supports 120Hz, alongside the contrast ratio, and all the other specifications that may or may not be important. Now, I can just search for those features and I’ll have the filter applied automatically. Beautiful!

Now for the problems.

A raw text search of “120Hz” doesn’t differentiate between Does have 120Hz, and doesn’t have 120Hz. Also there’s no way to apply your own sorting, and GOOG doesn’t handle ranges well. And this is why there is untapped potential. Google just announced that they’re creating an supplemental index for Custom Search, so why not add some extra extensions?

As the webmaster of ProductWiki I know the structure of the page better than a bot ever will. If I can provide search hints to say “THIS PART OF THE PAGE IS MORE IMPORTANT” that would be nice.

Also, these search companies need to handle date, and numeric ranges a lot better. I should be able to do $1000..$2000 and it’ll return me everything that has $1103.23 to $1,500. Same with dates, let me put in a variety of formats (isn’t even that important) and the parser understands what to look for.

Now I can do this kind of expansion of terms myself, but damnit this is their core competency.

In conclusion: I finally realize the power of unstructured search. It really does become the Database of Everything and that’s really friggin cool. Now with that power comes great responsibility, so search companies let’s step things up a notch and get some more advanced query handling happening.

[ Today's post is written by socialTNT's new contributing writer, Marie Williams. She joins us from her other blog, flackette. Please join me in giving Marie a warm welcome.]

Last Friday, socialTNT attended the very first Crunchie awards. For those of you who were unable to go or who missed the live webcast, we offer you a short recap with our picks for the best highlights.

The Crunchies 2007 were hosted by our favorite tech-blog monarchs TechCrunch, GigaOm, Read/Write Web and VentureBeat . With nominees like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and TechMeme, the event was a who’s who of technology greats. My dates for the evening were the talented team over at UGOBE, whose adorable robotic dinosaur, Pleo, was nominated alongside the iPhone and the Wii in the best new gadget category (full disclosure: UGOBE is a SHIFT client).

The event lay in stark contrast to the recently canceled Golden Globes awards, the infamous snoozefest known in recent years for its boring lineups and watered-down content. Without official “script writers” and fancy schmancy talent, the Crunchies awards presentation was one of the most entertaining awards ceremonies we’ve witnessed in quite a few years. I mean, who needs the typical, scripted dribble when you can watch Fake Steve Jobs drop f-bombs from the comfort of your own computer? Take that, FCC!

The awards ceremony was broadcast live over the Web and integrated a number of social media components. The Crunchies’ heavy incorporation of Web video may foreshadow a whole new era in award show formats. One of the most entertaining social media integrations of the night was a video compilation of 10-second responses from nominees. Introduced by video blogger Sarah Meyers, many of the responses were filmed using unconventional methods, including personal digital cameras and webcams.

Without further ado, here are socialTNT’s video picks of the night:

Best Live Version of a Viral Video: The upbeat crooning of The Richter Scales performing their popular You-Tube video “Here comes another Bubble” on-stage.

Best Award Into Video: CrunchGear’s John Biggs, dressed in a chic blazer with a floral ascot and a pipe hanging from his hand, announcing the nominees for Best New Gadget. Am I watching “Animal House” or an awards ceremony? No matter. The video is hilarious.

Best Acceptance Speech: (Fake) Steve Jobs (aka Dan Lyons) accepting the award for the iPhone as winner of Best New Gadget. My favorite part: “Steve” talks about the new MacBook Air while bending and twisting a Manila envelope to showcase the Air’s awesome design (“it’s actually in there right now”).

Best 10 Second Nominee Response Video: All of these were so amazing that we couldn’t pick just one. In the first video, the ProductWiki guys shows you how to bootstrap like a pro. In the second, Nova Spivack of Twine shows off THE most disruptive technology of all time. I promise, you will be blown away.

And that’s a wrap! Still not satisfied? Take a look at the full list of winners, or check out other recaps to munch on:

• ABC7 News
• ArsTechnica
• TechCrunch
• WIRED News
• ZDNet

Interesting use of wikis for journalism over at ProductWiki: from TechCrunch:

“The idea behind ProductWiki is to create collaborative product reviews that boil all the judgments about a product into one single review. It avoids revision wars by requiring every reviewer to list both pros and cons, and then every other ProductWiki reader can vote on each pro and each con until a consensus emerges.

“Last week, the site turned on three new features which Ismail hopes will allow him to create the ultimate “product graph” (this is like a social graph for products, showing how products are related or connected to one another). Reviewers can now identify competing or related products, and vote on which ones they like better in a head-to-head, A-B fashion. The third feature is a product rank derived from the first two features. For instance, based on 15 votes, the iRex iLiad beats out both the Kindle and the Sony Reader in the e-book category (so far).”