Chris O.

Always good to see that another reviewer has had a great experience with a company I've never heard of, so when I saw a fantastic review for these people I had to go look at the website myself. I haven't used the service, this is just a website review.

This is a Thai venture, with a Bangkok telephone number so that all looks legit. At the time of writing, the site has been there just a few weeks, so probably not long enough to establish any quality of service anyway.

It's a collage of clip-art images, and the photo which is supposed to be of their physical agency is actually of a different agent in Germany. Text on their "about us" page is about another entirely different agency, this time in Africa.

The quotes page, which for no apparent reason features a stock photo of a woman in a bathrobe, contains a DIY form from JotForm.com, as does the bookings page, with more clip-art which I believe I've seen on working-from-home sites previously.

I didn't find anything that wasn't either taken from elswhere or linked to services elsewhere, so I'd have to say the functionality of this site itself is zero.

Which is not to say that their service isn't fantastic, and if they're really offering half-price air fares and free insurance, it's not too surprising that they can't afford to create a site from their own material. Personally though, I think I'd need more evidence to suggest I wasn't dealing with someone working out of their bedroom before I booked an expensive flight, or indeed any flight at all.

Horrible horrible Chinese counterfeit wholesale site, shrieked "run away" the moment I opened the front page. There are enough clues there alone to tell you that you're about to either buy a heap of junk or, and I'm not sure which is luckier for you, get nothing for your money at all. Without doubt this is one to stay well away from!

[Update Jan 2nd 2010}
The site has now changed substantially, see:
http://ugg-hall-of-shame.posterous.com/uggstore-outletcom-update

[Update]
This one has changed slightly since I looked at it on November 9th (http://ugg-hall-of-shame.posterous.com/another-chinese-outlet-not-that-much-of-a-puz). They've removed the old credit card logos and replaced them with a cleaned-up version which doesn't include the giveaway Japanese credit card, they've removed the fake UGG logo and replaced it with a meaningless "satisfaction guaranteed" seal, and more importantly they've developed two new domains with identical sites at http://www.snowboots-outlet1.com and http://www.snowboots-outlet2.com.

So now there are at least three identical sites, maybe more, but in this case three's not the charm as they're all equally phony and unlikely to send you any goods at all. Beware, and next time please, please visit the following link which goes directly to a page listing every authorized UGG® Australia dealer online. Anywhere else claiming to sell genuine UGG® Australia boots is phony and should probably be avoided.

http://www.uggaustralia.com/retailstores/onlinestores.aspx

How do you type ® or a ©, or € or letters with accents, umlauts, cedillas and so on?

When you press a key on your computer keyboard, it sends a number to the computer rather than a letter, because computers don't understand human language. Sending an "A" would mean nothing to your machine, regardless of whether it was a PC or a Mac or whether it was running Windows or Linux or OSX or whatever operating system you might choose.

So, once upon a time, the problem was, how do we tell any computer, regardless of what it is, what the keys on the keyboard are? And the (rather long-winded) solution was the "American Code for Information Interchange", otherwise and thankfully shortened to "ASCII". This converted all the keys on your average keyboard into numbers that the computer could understand. But this wasn't enough - there were different currency symbols depending on what country you were in, there were registered trade marks and copyright symbols and all sorts of bits and pieces that a keyboard didn't have to start with. So the ASCII code was extended, producing - wait for it - the Extended ASCII code. Now, people could put an ® into their text, or a ©, or even a €. Impressive, huh?

That's what this page is about, and it's what enables me to talk about açaí berries with the correct accents on the letters.

(Notebook and laptop users, please scroll down to here **** first. If you don't have Windows or you don't have a PC, please scroll down to here ***)

The codes are shown in several different formats, but the only one that will concern most people is the number on the left hand side of the table. That's the actual number generated when you press a key. So, for example, if you find number 65 in the table, that's the number the computer sees when you press the A key with the shift key held down - capital A. A small "a" is number 97. Are you with me so far?

Great. Now then, there are also symbols such as ® which aren't on your keyboard at all. Go down the list and find the ® symbol, it's number 174. There is no key on your keyboard to type this, but there's a clever way to get it into your text anyway: first make sure your number pad is set to enter numbers - in Windows the "Num Lock" key must be pressed and the Num Lock light must be lit. Mac users... er... look it up in your manual, sorry guys. Next (and again for Windows) hold down your ALT key, which is generally next to the spacebar. Keep this held down, and then, on the number keypad - not on the numbers above the letters on the main part of the keyboard - type 0, 1, 7, and then 4 and then release the ALT key. You should get a ® symbol. Fantastic! Now you're empowered to insert any symbol, currency, foreign character, accent or indeed anything else included in the extended ASCII code into all your postings!

The rule (again, for Windows with a standard keyboard) is to look up the number of the symbol or whatever you want to type, add a zero on the front end, and then type that while holding an ALT key down. For example, character 64 is an@, which you can type by holding down the ALT key and typing 0, 6, 4 on your numeric keypad. Got it? Yes, I know this symbol is already on your keyboard, I wanted to demonstrate that everything has a number.

If you want to put a copyright symbol in your text, then you need to look up the number of the © symbol, which is 169. Or 0169, for our purposes. Start a posting, or open a text editor such as the Windows Notepad program, and then, while holding down the ALT key, type 0, 1, 6, 9 on the numeric keypad. You should get a © symbol. If you don't, and instead utterly weird things happen, then you haven't turned the "num lock" key on, so the keypad isn't sending numbers the way it's supposed to. Check if there is a light on above your keypad. If not, try pressing the Num Lock key, which is generally at the top left of the keypad.

This is a very useful thing to know and sets you apart from the crowd when, for example, you have a USA keyboard but still need to use the £ sign (ALT+0163). Or if you need to add a trademark to your work. Once you've got the idea, you can handle symbols and accents easily even if your keyboard doesn't have them. Which is pretty cool, as a matter of fact.

[EDIT -----------------------------]

I forgot to mention, if you've got Windows XP you can go to the START menu and then All Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools --> Character Map and there's a very extensive list of both ASCII character sets and all manner of extended character sets even including Arabic. These aren't strictly ASCII codes as they fall outside of the range, and have subsequently been given numbers - sometimes very long ones - so that you can, for example, add Arabic letters into an English text. Vista users, if there are any left, go to the Accessories folder and then the System Tools folder. Wins 7 users, let me know.

To use the map, you find your character and then just drag it into a selection box. You can create whole words this way. You can even select the font and the size.

This is terrific but of course MS had to make it stupidly hard to access. Even my Microsoft keyboard, which has a special function key for the Windows Calculator, doesn't have one for the equally useful Character Map. So if you're going to be using this a lot, the best thing to do is to add it to your Quick Launch toolbar and your desktop. To do this, first make sure your Quick Launch toolbar is on. Right-click on the toolbar, select "toolbars" from the mouse menu, and make sure "quick launch" is ticked. It will probably be on the left hand side of the main toolbar, though not necessarily. Now open the Start menu and go to Accessories and then System tools, and when you get to the menu that contains "Character Map", right-click over that and drag to the desktop. Release, and select "copy" from the menu. You should now have a desktop icon for the character map. Now right-click on this and drag it down to the Quick Launch toolbar, release, and select Copy again. Now you should have an icon which launches the utility from the toolbar and is always accessible even if you can't see the desktop.

[END EDIT ------------------------------------]

*** If you don't have Windows or you don't have a PC then you'll need to consult your user manual or look online to see how you generate ASCII characters with your keyboard. If you send me a message, I'll be happy to include that information here.

**** NOTEBOOK and LAPTOP users please note, none of this may work for you unless you have a dedicated number pad on your keyboard. You may have to enable your numbers with a function key, and there's even a possibility that you can't do this at all without buying a USB number pad. That's the price you pay for looking cool with a tiny computer. [EDIT: The tips for using the Windows Character Map work, though, and may be your best option.]

With 62 million books currently in their library database, this is a site to visit if you can't actually afford a book. This'll keep you busy reading until you can. And if you're already a reader, you'll be stunned by the sheer volume of material here and the range of activities available.

The concept is simple: sign up (it's free) then fill a few virtual shelves with books you've read, or are reading, or want to read, or categorize them in other ways you find appropriate (my favorite just now has to be "overrated drivel"). The busy librarians will add any new books you've discovered to their ever-expanding lists, and you're free to review your books and read some of the other members' reviews too - sometimes there are literally thousands of reviews for just one book. Whew. If you've got a whole library at home, you can go right ahead and add the lot. But even if you've only got "Bill Gates: The Road Ahead" there's a niche for you too. Maybe not such a big one.

Obviously if books aren't your thing, and sadly it seems that less people read books as time goes by, then you might still find yourself drawn in by other peoples' reviews and inspired to go read a book yourself and see what the experience does for you. Even for non-members, the amount of data here is astonishing; one book I picked at random had been rated more than 65,000 times and had more than 4000 reviews.

There is the now-obligatory social networking element too, of course, with interest groups and the opportunity to see what your friends are reading and recommending and have them peer over your shoulder as well. It's a pleasant enough break from YouTube, viral videos, and the more popular visual entertainments that web 2.0 has to offer. You might even be tempted to grab a book and actually go offline for a while. Scary, huh?

Nice clean site, well presented goods, extensive product range, and reasonable, but not bargain-basement, prices. Well, reasonable if these were the real thing, which of course they aren't, as the whole setup is a phony Chinese operation. Still, quite a decent presentation unless you're wise to these things. This one and another at www.edhardyonly.com are twins, both with equally phony product ranges.

Needless to say, any site certificates, seals, guarantees, Hacker-Safe or Verified or Verisign badges are also fakes. This isn't a secure or safe site to do business with.

Chinese counterfeiter, and a very obvious one at that. Props to Jeffrey T. For spotting it and now let's make sure nobody's fooled into using it.

Amongst other unlikely things, the site offers several shoes from Nike's popular Michael Jackson Memorial range and their controversial Obama range. But not one of these designs is made by Nike, nor have any of them ever been made by Nike. Both ranges, however, are still exclusive - they're exclusive to counterfeit wholesalers. Nothing beats wearing a pair of kicks that screams "Chinese fake".

Most of the reviews here are here because they're entries into a prize competition on the getxboxcodes.com site, and only people who post reviews on SiteJabber can take part. For all I know this could be a wonderful xbox 360 resource, but as SJ is about transparency, not solicitation, I can only give this a MEH for not being up front about what it's doing from the start.

You'll have to visit this one for yourself and decide if it rates better. It's not the site I mind, it's the methods.

http://neofile.posterous.com/cheating-27

This is potentially a useful resource if you're a caregiver or relative of a person with a cognitive brain disorder such as Alzheimer's disease, and you're located in the USA.

You start by creating a free account here and registering as many details about the person as you can. If that person then wanders away, the police and ambulance services can access the information quickly and also use the site to issue a public alert. Anyone you've previously placed on a contact list here will also immediately be alerted by both email and SMS text message.

Upcoming is a service that will also track your loved one via the GPS built into their cell phone. The phone on offer is a Boost Mobile model which comes with the GPS tracking software installed for an additional cost of only around $15. And it's a durable model with $5 of credit provided, so all you have to do is make sure your loved one is carrying it at all times. There's a subscription charge for the service ranging from $20 a month to just over $200 a year and the phone plus software costs $80 at the time of writing. Much more information on this service is available at the site.

This is a non-profit non-commercial affair running on a low- or no budget, and it shows in the rather patchy site content and layout at the moment. It really needs the donated services of a professional web designer or two to make the information better organized and accessible. But it is a new startup and it's only been in operation for a couple of months. I'm sure if it's successful, it will find support in many places. And so it should. Given that most dementia patients who wander off don't survive, anything that may help is worth promoting.

Although I do have a very elderly relative to care for myself, I'm fortunate in that he's not suffering from any of these terrible diseases and isn't at all likely to be wandering away in the near future. However, I could personally really use something along the lines of missingkeys.com or missingglasses.com, to cope with my own senior moments;-)

At the time of writing, this one is identical to uk-uggboots.co.uk and others. It's the latest design in the ongoing series of Chinese fakes, and it's probably the best one so far - from their point of view anyway. It's an attempt to copy the original site in much greater detail than before, right down to the UGG "favicon" in the address bar of your browser, and if you don't know about the whole Chinese fake thing, it will likely fool you. This one really is rather good.

The main giveaway for anyone who doesn't know how to identify a fake or isn't even aware that these phony sites exist, is that you cannot buy genuine UGG® Australia boots at these prices. These are simply fakes priced as fakes. The greater danger, of course, is that instead of receiving a pair of fake boots, your money will just vanish into thin air. In fact there may be more than a 50/50 chance that you'll get nothing at all and have no way to do anything about it.

If you've paid by credit card, you should notify the card company at once that this is a site selling Chinese replicas as genuine. The card companies must be up to their ears in disputes with these Chinese wholesalers so there's no real excuse for them to put you off, but they probably will anyway. You'll have to go through a dispute procedure but you should be compensated eventually.

Meanwhile, if it becomes obvious that you're not going to see that pair of fake Chinese boots ever, and you still want a pair of genuine UGG® Australia boots, then buy them from UGG at http://www.uggaustralia.com or from one of the authorized retailers listed on that site.

Whatever, please spread the word about these people wherever you can, especially if you use online forums or message boards. Tell your friends, UGG never, ever, sells its products out of China. They're made there, but they're never sold from there and neither does UGG ever ship its products from there to customers in other countries. Get the word out if possible and save someone else the same disappointment and distress.

Footnote: I just noticed this on the product pages here:

"Big Surprise When you receive your purchase! "

Hmm. I think more likely, receiving your purchase IS the big surprise.

(Because of current SJ limitations, please note that the thumbnail and URL shown for this review are incorrect. You need to go to http://www.campaper.com/main/index.html for this application)

A cool little piece of software for Windows that turns your static desktop wallpaper into live webcam views from around the world. These are not video cams, that would be possible but it's impractical unless you have heaps of processing power to spare. These are static images that refresh anywhere from every minute up to every fifteen minutes, with most having a five minute cycle.

All images are enlarged to fit your desktop resolution. There are small and there are large, the average size being 1024 x 768, which enlarges pretty well especially with modern high quality cameras. Quality varies enormously, depending on the source. You have the option of going through the list and selecting the ones you like and which suit your monitor the best, though, and as there are 350 of them you're likely to find many that fit the bill.

Aside from being able to view more than three hundred different scenes from around the world, you can also have the program display the contents of a local folder and you can create your own lists of cams from your favorites around the web. Lists can be sent to friends who have the program too, and they can then add them to their own selections. You can opt to view the changing scene from just one cam, or from a handful, or one country, or all 350 cams at random.

It's a simple application that does one thing well. It's free to download, and registering, also free, gives you fewer "nag screens" which encourage you to donate. If you do want to donate, the cost of removing all the nag screens is only ten euros, which is a bargain.

Excellent site for bargain hunters, with coupons, hot deals from around the web, all manner of freebies and a very active user forum with live and up to date information. Offers are generally current and relevant, and just the "free stuff" pages of the forum could keep you busy for an hour.

Recommended especially if you're broke and looking for a free sample of coffee or a free spittoon (no, honestly, found in the freebies section at the time of writing) or don't mind doing a free survey for a gift card or two, but also worth looking at before you spend real money on something more substantial. Always plenty to see here and a good site to bookmark.

This is one for all you iPhone owners. The Pong case, with built-in Pong module, promises to lower the amount of brain-destroying radiation which shoots straight from your iPhone into that squishy bit between your ears. The explanation contains enough pseudo-science to be highly suspicious, and the $60 price tag suggests a product in search of a sucker.

Oddly enough, though, the Pong appears to work, as Wired magazine found recently when it tested one. The device was shown to cut the radiation emitted towards the head by up to two thirds, which was both unexpected and awfully embarrassing for Wired, which had only recently suggested in public that the whole thing was phony.

If you're seriously concerned about the risks of cell phone radiation to your brain, then you'll already be using a passive headset (i. E. not BlueTooth) which is more certain and considerably cheaper. And your iPhone will be safely tucked away in your pocket where the radiation can amuse itself with, well, other parts of your anatomy.

The FCC haven't yet approved any device for this purpose, so the manufacturers of Pong can only claim that the device has been tested in FCC-approved labs. And nobody's certain whether the radiation from cell phones is safe or dangerous, though the FCC does set a maximum limit on average radiation over time. If spikes cause more risk, or if the extra power a phone uses in a low-signal area causes more risk, there's no proof of either and the FCC has no regulations to cover these situations. All this uncertainty might well make you think seriously about protecting yourself just to be on the safe side, and if you like the idea of doing that and being fashionable in a kind of geeky way too, the Pong may be right up your street.

I'm puzzled by this one. At random, I started off with a page titled "Multifunction Printer Reviews, Best Cheap All In One Printers", and yet there were printers on this page costing up to $5429. There were four printers pictured on the left hand side of the page, each with a "cheap deals" panel, but all the panels were empty. Of the others shown, the cheapest was a Canon which according to this was $114 on Ebay, though I found an identical brand new one on Ebay without help for $69. Other prices linked to a list on shopping.com which I could obviously have found by going to that site.

The page also collected about a dozen references from reviews on other sites around the web, some of which were conflicting user opinions, which wouldn't help me much if I were looking to make a sound buy.

On the same page was a promotion for a blog article entitled "Light cheap laptop", which read

"Thin and light laptops that cost less than $1000? No way, you say. But wait... The New York Times reports that by early summer there will be several new products on the market that meet these requirements."

By early summer? But there are already a load of cheap netbooks for under $1000. So I looked at the date of the article - May, making it six months out of date. Not very useful, really.

Another blog article announced the launch of a new range of HP products, but that was also six months out of date.

Soldiering on, I tried the page about netbooks, about which there should be plenty of current information. This was a review of sub-$300 machines, though the cheapest price shown here was $290, and that's about the price everyone charges, it's not a bargain. Again, down the left hand side of the page there were four "best cheap netbooks" but all the "cheap deal" panels were empty. And the rest of the items on the page weren't computers at all, but computer bags and sleeves.

There was a very long article about the generalities of netbooks which wasn't bad, and referenced some other sources for the fine details. However, the only link I clicked on - and I promise you it really was at random - led to a 404 "page not found" error.

Finally I went to netbookreviews.com, I site I found simply by looking on Google, and there was a page entitled "7 best netbooks for under $300" that was written this week, making it bang up to date. The Cheapism page had been put together six weeks earlier and missed out on three out of the seven that this site was reviewing. More seriously, the three it missed out included two that were in the top three best buy choices.

Just to be sure, I opted for a complete change of scene and chose toaster ovens for my last random pick. There were three recommended "best cheap ovens". None of these three appeared in the top recommended on consumersearch.com or pricegrabber.com or toasterovensguide.com or wize.com and after that I sort of lost interest.

Based on these experiences, I couldn't trust this site as a primary resource. I'd do what I normally do and shop around, use Google to search on appropriate key phrases and do some general homework before spending my money. I'm not saying that cheapism.com doesn't show you cheap products, but from this experience I'd have to say that those products aren't necessarily the ones you'd want to buy and may even not be the best value pricewise either.

Footnote: This is an actual reviewer's experience on the live site. Not a copy of the text which appears at MakeUseOf.com, which they got from Lifehacker.com, which they got from wisebread.com, where the original article by Nora Dunn originated. When I found that, to be fair I did read it and noted that she'd had a good experience with the auto GPS page on cheapism.com. So I went and had a look at that. It does - probably correctly - identify the Garmin nuvi 205W as a good choice. However the price it gives, "starting at $167" is incorrect on both sites it links to, shopping.com and Amazon.com. And the photo and description it has is for the 205 model, not the 205w, which is a different size. The Magellan 1340, which cheapism.com lists as starting at $143, can be had for $130 at Google products. The TomTom XL 340S, shown as "starting at $175" is $146 also at Google products. These may all be small and insignificant points, but this is a site you visit to look at prices first and foremost, and they should be both correct and the best deals on offer. Otherwise, you can do better just by using Google.

The most likely way you'll come across this site is when it turns up in Google listings about online services and merchandise. If you're looking at search engine returns for things like acai products or weight loss programs, there's a fair chance an ezinearticles.com link will be in there somewhere. And when you visit the page, you'll find an "expert article" which invariably promotes the product and gives you at least one link which takes you to another website which sells it.

This is the premier venue for affiliate and other kinds of marketers to promote themselves and their wares whilst being able to portray themselves as "experts" on the subjects they're writing about. There are hundreds of thousands of articles here. The most prolific article writer, who can claim to having written a staggering twenty-one thousand articles by himself alone, is Sean Mize, who runs a website called secrets-of-internet-success.com which he claims will teach you how to earn large sums of money by... writing online articles. Several other experts here have thousands of expert articles each, which sort of makes you wonder where they find the time to actually practice the expertise they're so busy writing about.

If you arrive on a page here without being aware that this is a marketing site, you won't see anything which identifies the author as having a financial interest in the subject he or she is writing about. And you'll sometimes see a bunch of "comments" which are unsurprisingly supporting the product that's being written about. These are not always entirely helpful; the one I came across about an acai colon cleanse product described it as "like shooting two birds in one stone." Which says it all, really.

Don't be fooled, this is generally not an authority you can trust, especially in the instances of "reviews" about currently fashionable products. If you really think your colon needs cleansing, go see your doctor - not a professional article writer who's being paid to push you in a profitable direction.

Avoid this one, it presents as a consumer product review site but in fact it's doing nothing other than promoting all the products shown and making a profit from getting you to click through to other sites. I posted it as an indication of what these types of sites look like and as a warning not to believe what you read.

I seem to recall these guys from about ten years ago, but I've not been back to the site since then. I didn't even know sites like this had survived the transition to Web 2.0, and let's be honest, sending e-cards and Flash animations is *very* Web One. In fact I can date the craze to around 1997 or thereabouts.

If you're into sending this sort of stuff, you probably won't do any better than this site. The artwork and animation is polished and professional. You have to be a member to get the best material though, and they don't seem to want to tell you how much that costs until after you've given them your personal information.

I can see how weary cube farm employees might be sending this sort of thing to each other out of boredom, and anyone under about 10 years old will get a good laugh out of many of these too. I must just have an odd sense of humor, because I didn't find anything I'd personally choose to send to anyone. The main new idea, from what I can see, is putting your friends' and family's heads into the animations. And I can imagine that anyone who had no idea that was possible would be awfully impressed.

This is one of those occasions when I can't agree with the enthusiasm of other reviewers. This one is OK, but it doesn't inspire me to rate it higher than that.

One of the few sites that justifies the adjective "awesome". Definitely more news from more sources than you'll need, but that won't stop you from wanting to read it all anyway. In recognition of the humungous vastness of it all, there's a "more..." tag at the end of every list which spares you from being overwhelmed by the whole lot at once. And in a very smart use of real-time interactivity, you may "clip" any and all the headlines that take your fancy and the links will be stored in your own personal menu for later. And this isn't even a service you need to register for, it's automatic and persistent, surviving even a clean reload of the page. With sources as far apart as the New York Times, Huffington Post and Flickr, and with a whole slew of blogs, vblogs and podcasts thrown in, it's unlikely you'll have caught up with today's buzz before tomorrow.

So a couple of North Carolina comedians, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, started to collect embarrassingly bad local TV commercials for fun, and now they've got a sponsor so they can come to your town and make a free embarrassing TV commercial for the local business that you nominate. The idea has proved so popular that apparently many businesses have been nominating themselves.

The real stars, of course, are the collected local TV commercials themselves, and some of the absolutely worst ever have been lovingly preserved here for posterity. No professional editing, scriptwriting, direction, costume or makeup has been allowed to come between the local business and its shot at commercial TV success.

It's humorous in a kind of quirky, edgy way, by which of course we mean that you might well not find it funny at all. You might cringe at the sight of upstanding members of the business community unintentionally making themselves look bad in the interest of self promotion. But hey, these ads are a national treasure, albeit a very small one, and someone needs to make sure they're saved for future generations to enjoy.

There's probably no way you're going to understand Chinese society by reading Chinese newspapers and magazines, though I think I can honestly say that you'll have a different viewpoint afterward. This site is an aggregator of news articles and comment from many Chinese language web sources, translated into English and made very readable for us in the West. Comment on the articles, also originally in Chinese and well translated, throws light on what the Chinese people themselves think about the issues that occupy their news media and the way they are presented. This is a must-read if you want to get a fresh look at China through the eyes of the Chinese. Recommended.

UPDATED:

A year on from the previous review, I've been revisiting this site recently and wanted to make a few more comments.

Firstly, I think I should have been a bit more cautionary in the earlier one, as this is a site for moderately mature audiences and may not be family friendly in some areas, at all. Chinese society is very different to the west, and sometimes those differences don't make for comfortable reading. Likewise, the site sometimes does lean toward the sensational, and the odd story and image here and there may be disturbing.

There is also no guarantee that mature language (or perhaps, immature language, depending on how you look at it) won't creep into the comments, which are often outspoken.

In other words, this is a very direct and largely uncensored community and you should be aware of that. Though the idea of bringing China to the west through translation and imagery is by no means a new one, this particular concept pulls few punches compared to those aimed more at encouraging tourism and painting attractive pictures, than telling the news as the people see it and hear it. I recommend it, because of that, and because the audience here has an unique voice. But just be aware, China Smack is not everyone's cup of green tea.