[Consumer Information][Window Dressing][Small Business Setup][Portals][Search Engines][Person to Person Shopping][Internet Hard Drive]

Consumer Information

These sites try to give you unbiased information concerning all types of products, generally reviewed by the consumers who bought them.  Another site - Productopia - emphasizes reviews written by its professionals, and then lets consumers get their comments in concerning products on a secondary area.  To attract more participants, most sites try to attempt to build "communities" around different product categories.  Apinions.com stood out in this category by trying to include lots of information on the reviewers (including photographs), making it more easy to identify those reviews whom you might trust or distrust.

ConsumerReview.com - ConsumerReview.com links a series of communities around "passionate interests."  Generally, the reviews are detailed, well organized, and helpful.    The home page has an index of about a dozen major categories, followed by a list of Hot PIcks and Featured Reviews.  ConsumerReview.com places a strong emphasis on outdoor sports, an outlook that alligns them with many of their partner merchant sites, such as MountainZone.com and PlanetOutdoors.com.  However, in doing so, it lacked information concerning other common product categories such as home appliances and health and beauty products.

ConsumerReview currently links to 17 communities ranging from AudioReview.com to VideoGameReview.com.  Each community has its own look and feel, although they generally contain the same basic features including a subindex and individual product reviews.  It is difficult to do comparison shopping using this site - you can only get information concerning one product at a time.

Deja.com - Deja.com starts with a simple home page with a good search tool.  The top products of the day are also listed, along with a site index broken down into a dozen categories.  Deja.com has a system for rating the consumer product reviewers, the ratings aren't always useful.  This site does give a side-by-side comparison feature which lets you check off all interesting products in a category, after which Deja.com builds a comparison table displaying all their key features together.  Product Wizard is another feature which narrows down your choices in real time as you select criteria.

The personalization features are also impressive. When you first register, Deja.com builds a My Deja personal page where you can save product reviews or searches, Web bookmarks, communities and discussion threads.  If you want, Deja.com will also forward you an email whenever there is new information on a product or search saved on your page.  This site has very good potential to become the ultimate site for tracking your favorite products for comparison shopping.  ITs devotion to unfiltered consumer reviews is admirable, although possibly its weakest feature.

Epinions.com - Epinions.com tries to take the weakest feature of Deja.com and make it one of its strongest.  Epinions.com aims to motivate its users to write the best product reviews possible, motivating them in two ways: first, it fosters a good sense of community; second, it offers the best reviewer motivation with cash rewards.  Their home page is modeled on Yahoo!, with search features, and a comprehensive index that covers 13 major categories  Everytime you visit the home page, there's a different Featured Reviewer complete with profile and photo.  This feature suggests good community effort that Epinions.com is attempting to build.  As you  use the site, Epinions.com builds a "Web of Trust" based on users you trust, the users those users trust, and so on.    The user reviews are groups into Pros and Cons, along with a Summary.

You might also chose to sign up for the site's cash rewards programs, called Eroyalties.  Generally speaking, the program gives nominal cash rewards based upon the number of users who read your reviews, and how much they like them.  Epinions.com doesn't offer the same level of personalization as Deja.com, but you do get a member profile page where you can enter information such as your interests, the URL of your personal page, favorite links, and trusted members.

mySimon - This is a shopping bot at its best.  mySimon queries so many sites - more than 1700 - it does a better job of finding the best deal than other shopping agents do.  It is also divided into dozens of categories that cover just about any item you might like to buy.

DealTime - This shopping site is quite unique in that if it doesn't find what you are looking for, it will continue to try.  Just give it two pieces of information and it will continue to search the Web for you until it finds the item.  Then it will notify you in the downloadable Desktop Notifier and you can go make the purchase.

Internet Hard Drives

@backup - This suite provides backup and restore only.  You purchase 100 MB of storage for $99.95/year, but can add on additional 100 MB increments at $50/year up to 400 MB.  This site installs a program on your yard drive that loads every time you boot.  You decide on which files or folders you want added to your standard backup set, and run scheduled on on-demand backups.

Connected Online Backup - This site offers several backup plans, such as 100 MB for $6.95/month, or unlimited space for personal systems at $14.95/month.  Connected installs an application on your hard drive that performs scheduled backups.  The application can restore files over the Internet or from CDs of your bakcup (available for $24.95 for up to three CDs).

Driveway.com -This site gives you seamless integration with Microsoft Office 2000, along with instant 25 MB of free storage.  However, sign-up and survey-taking bonuses can increase this to 100 MB.  Driveway will also sell space in 100MB increments at $29.95 for 90 days, or $107.95 for a year.  You can access your Driveway files by a Web interface from any browser.  Driveway does not have specific backup and restore features but you can do these functions manually by using copy and restore.

X:drive - This is a site that gives you 25 MB of online storage and bonuses of 5 MB per friend you sign up.  You can also buy additional space, starting at $4.95 a month for 25 MB.  You access your X-drive space by a Web-browser interface.  You can also get to the off-site drive by an icon placed on your desktop when you install X:drive's special application.  During this setup, the program will recognize proxy servers, pick up settings from Internet Explorer or Netscape, and insert an X:drive icon into your Windows Explorer tree.  Over the Internet, you can simply uload and download by dragging and dropping files to the X:drive folder.  You can also open a file on the X:drive site with ny application, edit it, and save it back to the site.  You can share your information by selecting the file to share and have X:drive assign it a URL, which is then insertedinto an e-mail.  The receiver can access this file by clicking on the link inside the e-mail.  X:drive doesn't provide explicit backup and restore software.  However, you can perform these tasks using file operations or any software that allows backup to mapped network drived.  X:drive is a superb tool for file transfer and a useful tool for storing backups of essential files.

Window Dressing

WindowBlinds from Stardock Corp. is a shareware application that lets you load skins to change the style (as well as the colors and fonts) of title bars, toolbars, buttons, menu icons, and check boxes - not just in Windows but in all other applications as well.  You can have themes that can create a specific look - anything from "Star Trek" to the Mac OS.  You can find hundreds of free skins at www.skinz.org and www.windowblinds.net.

Chroma from Thematic Software ($20 direct), uses themes to give open applications and windows sculpted buttons, cylindrical scroll bars, and color schemes.  You can download themes from Thematic's site or create your own.

CoolDesk takes this whole idea even further by letting you create up to nine different desktops, each with its own windows, applications, taskbar buttons, and wallpaper.  You could create a new desktop for each project you're working on - or a new desktop for every person in your family.  A desktop manager - a small panel with a button representing each desktop - lets you switch among desktops, and it can be customized with skins available from ShellToys.

Cnet - You can go to this site to get all forms of downloads - for the Mac, PC, Palm, and Pocket PC - everything downloadable can probably be found here!

Small Business Setup

Bigstep.com - At this site, you will be able to set up a storefront on the Web, complete with a convenient to-do list.  You do need to sign up for a merchant account through the site if you wish to process credit card orders - and you will need to do that to be successful on today's net.

freemerchant.com - This site is totally free; the only tradeoff is that you must display ads on your storefront Web site.  However, freemerchant.com will let you choose your advertisers that best suit your taste.  You will also get top-notch importing and exporting features to Intuit's QuickBooks, a secure shopping cart, store-building tools, unlimited catalog listings, traffic logs, and an e-mail account.  What could be better!

Portals (Web Start Pages)

About.com - The people on the home page are a few of the site's 650 guides; people who have signed up to take responsibility for a particular subcategory within the site's 18 major categories.

Lycos - Lycos has multiple sites (such as Angelfire, HotBot, Tripod, etc.) all of which have the same registration.

msn.com - This is now a highly evolved site with a brand-new interface, featuring a universal in-box that handles both e-mail and chat threads, mSN Mobile for sending news headlines and stock quotes to wireless gadgets (including cell phone), free home-page building, a vastly improved search engine, and a new shopping directory.

Yahoo! - This is the portal that I use, and it is the center of many other people's Web experience.  It includes auctions, shopping, Web store setup, chats, and instant messaging.  

Search Engines

AltaVista - The latest look for AltaVista makes it more like Yahoo! than ever before including a customizable home page for the first time, including audio and video, along with more direct links to shopping.com, discussions, among others.

Direct Hit - Like Google, Direct Hit, which integrated into such sites as HotBot, LookSmart, and Lycos, is a relevance engine that analyzes the activities of millions of previous Internet searchers to determine the most relevant site for your search request.

HotBot - This search engine is a part of The Lycos network, and performs fast, accurate, and relevance ranked results.  Search within date ranges, then do a second search based upon your initial results to provide better search results.

Google - This is a unique search engine that is put out by Sanford University designed to find the most relevant Web pages (those with the most inbound links) and run searches against them.  Since February, 1999 it has been a commercial venture, and given its knack for returning extremely relevant results, I believe it is destined to succeed.

Northern Light - This search engine puts your search results into folders based on their sources, making it easier for you to figure out which results you should focus your attention upon.  This site also provides access to non-Web based information sources from over 5,400 magazines, newswires, and academic journals that you can't find anywhere else online.  New to the site is SearchAlert, which e-mails you we an item in a category you've specified is added.

Person-to-Person Shopping

Andale - Andale provides a tool for pulling all your auction activity into one interface, helping you automate your buying and selling and generating useful reports along the way  Also, sellers can even use the site to pool resources by having other sellers with more experience and established online reputations sell their merchandise for them.

Auctions.com - Though the marker may be smaller, the site is no less well equipped than the larger auction sites.  It offers escrow service from BidSafe, pager notification, and most of the other bells and whistles that you have come to expect from a fully evolved auction house.

eBay - This is probably the most widely known auction site, and is generally received well by users.  

eWanted.com - At this shopping site, things are done a little bit differently.  You describe exactly what you are looking for and how much you are willing to pay.  These requests are then read y registered dealers, stores, and individual sellers who have expertise in a particular category of merchandise.  If they have a match, then they contact you directly - generally by e-mail.

[Top]