Reviewers clash over tech products

Web site Product Clash aims to become a technophile’s version of battle of the bands; in this version, online users of Product Clash can rank and rate new tech products in side-by-side competition.

For instance, how do people rank and compare the iPod Touch vs. the iPod Classic? Or in another clash, the Helio Ocean phone vs. the iPhone?

Based on votes and rankings there, the Touch surpasses the Classic, and the iPhone smothers the Ocean.

Once a user registers for free, he or she can clash with other users and can also submit his own product descriptions and technical specifications via a “Submit your Clash” form.

There’s also a Facebook application here.

Mahalo.com

Another site trying to bring relevance and smarter selection to search, Mahalo organizes information by categories and by rankings from “expert” users.

The guides, who are Mahalo employees, rank results for a search and then list other links and search results that have relevance for what one is looking for. Try the search for “Ridley Scott,” the director of “Blade Runner.” Check out the results down the left side to get an idea of how Mahalo tries to generate decent results.

The site’s tagline is “We’re here to help.” Notably, Mahalo has created a second area, called Mahalo Greenhouse, which is all about encouraging searchers to find and rank quality search results. The kicker: the more “clean,” spam-free results one helps find, the more cash Mahalo pays you.

So far, we like the site.

Confabb.com

There probably are not a lot of sites that try to track down and catalog all the conferences taking place around the world.

Confabb.com is the only one we know of. Largely built out of RSS feeds being gathered from all over, the site organizes upcoming conferences by topic and category.

This coming week, for instance, it finds more than 145 conferences about to start; they range from the Autumn Perfumes conference happening in Kuwait, to the Zak Interior Design conference in New Delhi.