Chris O.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this one. Largely, because it doesn't work in Firefox on my machine due to some javascript screw-up. But I can try to explain the concept anyway.

The idea here is that you join up and create the usual profile, then you start a multi-user chat between you and your friends, and the same chat appears on the home pages of all the chatters, and other people can join in or not, or something like that. I got confused almost immediately and couldn't figure out what it was supposed to look like in the absence of visual examples. Nor did I grasp the difference between this and an ordinary chatroom where you meet up and chat with your friends. But apparently there's a difference and this concept is unique. Maybe I need someone to walk me through it, then, because I'd really like to get it but I didn't.

As Firefox was only letting me see the passive parts of the pages, I eventually fired up a page in IE, much against my will, and I did see a thread containing a couple of replies. It didn't look any different from a thread in a forum. The statement that this person was in 5 other conversations was not accompanied by a way to find them, nor was it clear to me how to look for other interesting conversations or to add friends from the existing site members. So I went back to Firefox, which presented me with a uniformly grey page which was at least soothingly unchallenging.

The language of the site is generally OK but there are odd missing words and one giveaway expression which identify the writer as Asian, most likely Indian. So I took a look at the site registration details and it seems to be owned by a Berkeley University student with an Asian name. With the greatest respect, if I were he, I'd be getting the site text proofread by someone else; It doesn't interfere with the functionality of the site - at least as far as I can tell, since I never really saw it functioning - but it doesn't impress either.

I guess that although the site is in public beta, it's really at the very start of its life and has a long way to go. There can be very few users, as I was able to choose my own name as a username, and I didn't find anything going on. Still, I think the author is trying to convey a new idea here and could probably use some support and feedback; it's tough to come up with a genuinely new angle on social interaction on the web, and I think people are already overloaded with ways to communicate their every thought and bodily function in real time as it is. If this site is to offer yet another, it needs to capture the attention of the likes of you and I and hold it better than it seems able to do at the moment.

Spreeder is a deceptively simple web-based tool that is designed to help you read faster. Words which you choose - either by cutting and pasting your own text or by using the Spreeder bookmarklet - are then flashed back at you according to a set of parameters of your own choosing. The most significant of these are the words per minute, and the chunk size. The latter refers to the number of words that are flashed back to you at a time. In addition you can select your own font size and color, window size and background color. Further and more advanced settings allow you to experiment with parameters such as variable chunk size and skipping over certain types of words.

There are two useful provided links, one to a Wikipedia article on the subject of speed reading in general, and one to a good blog entry in which the author tries the tool for himself and suggests ways to approach it.

As is noted in that blog, this tool is a good way to learn to speed read online material but further and different techniques are also needed to speed read books and other offline sources. So if you spend most of your life online and find that you're a stranger to the printed word these days, this is going to be well worth your while pursuing.

Oddly pointless pidgin-English blog with only a single article at this time, I only looked at this one because someone else posted it first. I can't think why.

Chinese counterfeiter. The usual cautions apply.

This one looks set to be a genuine killer startup. Here's the concept: put a social community in charge of running a radio station, by letting everyone vote each track on your beginning playlist up or down. The ones with most positive votes get to stay on the list, the ones with least, drop off. Now add an opportunity to "bomb" a track - even in the middle of playing - off the air, or "rocket" it up to the top of the playlist. Hand out rewards for the most popular rocketeers. Then throw in a real-time chatroom, the usual bunch of social profile and searching features, and finally, add more stations, all with the same features, and let listeners switch between them as they please.

Then, while you're still in beta, announce that you're striking deals across the world to start up user-controlled radio programmes everywhere in the next several months.

Yes, it will hook you. If, that is, you're happy with the music on offer - a fairly eclectic range of material from Iron Maiden to The Ramones to The Beach Boys. Classic and modern rock with some top indy bands seemed to dominate when I looked. If you're looking for anything outside of that, you'll have to wait to see if Jelli spreads successfully to other genres.

The site boasts a more than competent design which is well in keeping with the core concept and presents more or less everything you need clearly and accessibly. I would definitely have liked to see tooltips for the primary actions you can make, though, as I forgot almost immediately what the buttons were for. You may be uncomfortable with the real-time scrolling chatroom, as there is no censorship of adult language as yet, but other than that it's a fairly comfortable environment once you settle in.

The only technical issue I hit was with Firefox, which opened a new window to play the audio stream. When I switched to a different channel, Firefox opened another new window and continued to stream the first station while also streaming the second. I had to close one window manually.

This is going to be one to watch - and listen to - over the next few months as the service really takes off and the project moves out of beta and matures.

One can either review the business opportunity (MLM scheme) or the product, or both; they are both marketed on the same site.

As someone else here has noted, the MLM scheme is unlikely to earn a rep much more than the price of the product. According to Forbes magazine, only one percent of reps make anything at all.

The product itself has doubtful nutritional value. There is no scientific evidence that it protects you against anything, cures you of anything, helps reduce weight, or achieve anything other than you might expect from a glass of fruit juice. Other fruit juices also fare better and cost less.

Still, if you have $40 to spare and an urge to believe, you go for it. Placebos do work, sometimes.

My take on it:
http://neofile.posterous.com/not-berry-convincing

Agreed, took what I thought would be a quick look and found there are many, many of these. Different sites and companies, same bull. Kevin Trudeau's* "Free Money" and "Debt Cures" book, widely infomercialized on American TV, has opened the flood gates to people who charge you money for telling you they know how you can make money.

All the government grant information can be found, surprisingly enough, at (free) government websites, but the myth that an ordinary private person can rake in thousands really is a myth.

Broadly speaking, grants are most often available to organizations, companies, institutions and so on, are so complex and time-consuming to apply for that applicants often have to employ professional grant application writers, and require that the applicant fulfills many requirements in order to avoid having to pay it all back.

This is yet another example of people being distracted by get-rich-quick schemes instead of going to the right place for their information. These sites prey on those who don't know how to search efficiently on the web, and/or are new enough to it all not to realize how many tricksters are out there and how "authentic" their web sites look.

This from grants.gov, the site you should go to for government grants information given that (a) it's about grants and (b) it's published by the government:

"We have all seen them; late night infomercials, websites, and reference guides, advertising "millions in free money" Don't believe the hype! Although there are many grants on Grants.gov, few of them are available to individuals and ***none of them are available for personal financial assistance.***" (my emphasis)

*Kevin Mark Trudeau (born February 6,1963) is an American author, infomercial salesman, convicted felon, founder of the International Pool Tour, self-proclaimed alternative medicine advocate and an unsuccessful defendant in several Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuits. ~ Wikipedia

Knowing little about the trade in mmorpg accounts, money and items, and after reading that the "virtual goods"industry in the USA alone is expected to hit $1 billion this year, I was pleased that another reviewer suggested this one. As with a lot of these sites, it turned out to be a part of a much larger Chinese network. I didn't really have all day to go looking for them, but here are the few I did find before I got bored:

First up is this one, tibiaitem.com. The Customer email address is gamekingj[at]hotmail.com and the domain registrant is named as Jun Zhou, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com.

Here come some more, note the common features:

tibiamoney.com
Customer email: gamekingj[at]hotmail.com
SKYPE: mithras_ye
Registrant: Jun Zhou, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

runescape100m.com
Customer email: gamekingj[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: Jun Zhou, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

www.18min.com
Customer email: exprises[at]hotmail.com or riceswing[at]msn.com
Registrant: jun zhou, email: butterfly-*******[at]163.com

guildwarsgoldmoney.com
Customer email: exprises[at]gmail.com and gamekingj[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: James Long, mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

gw100k.com
Customer email: exprises[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: Jun Zhou, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

enjoygolds.com
Customer email: exprises[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: liu yeqing, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

www.gamezmoney.com
Customer email: gamekingj[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: James Long, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

www.10minget.com
Customer email: gamekingj[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: James Long, email: mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

rs15min.com
Customer email: gamekingj[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: James Long, email mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

gameotl.com
Customer email: gameotl[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: liqing yu, email mithras[at]hotmail.com
Admin contact: jun zhou, email: mithras[at]hotmail.com (non-address)

gamegoldcoin.com
Help Desk: gameotl[at]hotmail.com
Registrant: (masked, false address, no email)
Admin contact: jun zhu, email: mithras[at]hotmail.com

runescape4u.org - closed. Contact was mithras_ye[at]hotmail.com

And at that point I decided to move along. But I had already come across a different bunch of Chinese sites, so I know there are a lot more out there. Even without getting into that, according to the domain registrars, James Long owns about 310 domains. The email address mithras_ye is associated with 96 domains.
Jun Zhou owns about 119 domains. Liqing yu owns about 4 domains. I've only scratched the surface.

I thought it especially interesting that many, if not all, of the addresses given to the domain registrars are useless - no street numbers, random postal codes. Nobody seems to have been inclined to verify that the addresses even exist. And obviously the same email addresses are floating around attached to different people.

The trade in accounts, items and gold is massive and there are endless sites out there doing much the same thing. My guess is that at least some of these are well-placed to take your money and give nothing back, and that's probably exactly what they do. I have no proof so I will say no more other than that some of these have been reported as phishing sites by others.

If you don't understand what these sites do, by the way, you don't need one. And they aren't going to tell you anyway. If you do understand, please be careful who you trade with; if possible find a few people who've had successful trades before you jump in. And bear in mind that not everyone is who they seem, especially in a virtual world.

Thankfully, URDB - the Universal Record Data Base - is not as dry as it sounds. Its purpose is to challenge you to establish a World Record for yourself, in anything you can imagine that's legal and doesn't cause you actual harm or worse (underwater hang-gliding, for example). Then encourage your friends to establish their own or try to beat yours, and then try to beat yours, yourself, or see any of the examples already on site and try to best them, too. If your record achieves something positive for your species, so much the better.

For a record which arguably does nothing for Humankind but make us laugh, watch Aimee Fountain successfully achieve the World Record For Naming The Most Candy Bars In 30 seconds While Being Tickled:

http://urdb.org/Content/RecordDetail.aspx?id=1094&attempt=2095

The authentic UGG site, you know? The one that people don't go to, to buy UGG shoes, because that Chinese one has them cheaper?
Look around, see the difference a well-designed web site makes. It's conservative, no fireworks, but a huge leap from the junky fakes that are going around just now. I'm not that keen on the shoes, though, but they must be good to attract as much attention as they do.

With apologies and respect to other reviewers, I do want to observe that this is not the only web site at which you may buy genuine UGG® Australia products in safety. There are literally hundreds of authorized online retailers. Currently you can see a list of them here:

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

Anyone else pretending to sell UGG® Australia products is a phony, including every site that does so and which has the term UGG in the name. This does cover almost every Chinese site out there at present, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that change once they realize we're on to them. Expect them to start inventing more plausible, ugg-less domain names before long. Then we'll need to check that list and be even more cautious before we buy.

Be aware also that there are several legitimate companies manufacturing ugg boots in Australia and New Zealand, and selling them under their own trademarks. These companies aren't associated with UGG® Australia and generally are keen to point that out. As the word "ugg" cannot be trademarked in either of these countries, any company may use it. Proceed with caution though and remember that it's the ones claiming to either sell or manufacture the genuine UGG® Australia products that need checking out with UGG Australia themselves before you buy.

What the internet was made for. Or ought to have been. Not to be confused with stuffonmycat.net, which when I looked, had a lot of photos of cats with no stuff on them, thereby failing to understand the point entirely. Has spawned at least one forum for people who love stuff on their cats to connect, sold more than a hundred thousand copies of the paper version and is probably making Zazzle rich with its range of aprons, tees, ties and so forth, which on receipt owners presumably pile on their cats if there seems to be any space left. An icon of Web 1.0 and a lasting classic, for reasons we can all understand but find awfully hard to explain.

This one is a trainwreck. Office address is fake, registrant address is fake, telephone numbers are not fake but, contrary to appearances, are cell phones probably not in the UK at all. One is a "premium" number for which they can charge you as much per minute as they like when you call. Product photos are laughable - MacBook Pro photo is of an empty box; Sony camera is a Nikon. IPhone 3Gs is an obvious fake. Claims? Buy 10 Mac Airs and get 2 free? ROTFLMAO and in any case they don't even sell fake Mac Airs, let alone real ones. The actual store mechanism is the only professional part, but they pay $19.99 a month to rent that. All the reassuring badges on the front page are fake, the site looks like it was designed and implemented by a 7-year old with only about an hour to spare for the whole deal, and who lost interest before reaching the Terms and Conditions - there are none. Last straw is the prices which establish beyond doubt that the goods are counterfeits, if they exist at all, which they probably don't.

Since all the published information is false, I'm going out on a limb and suggesting this one is either in China, or somewhere in the Russian federation. Hard to tell, because they don't use enough English to analyze. And that's probably intentional.

Total trainwreck. Need I add, avoid?

A pretentious little number, starts off with a big head and little froth, very full of itself with an aroma of one-upmanship and subtle tones of self-indulgence and wet beards. Faint but distinct geekiness in the background, sometimes leading to a bad taste in the mouth.

Well what do you expect me to say? They trashed Newcastle Brown Ale, an English icon. Serves them right.

Seriously, American beers totally pwned the Worlds Worst Beers list, scoring a whopping 19 out of the top - I mean bottom - 20, and rating even worse than Mexican Cave Creek Chili Beer, which is disgusting. But at the other end, the USA romped home with 74 out of the top 100 beers, which is pretty impressive. As you might expect, Belgian beers took most of the rest of the places but I was disappointed to see only one English beer make it into this rareified atmosphere. I'm sure we should have done better than this.

Still, there are country leagues too, so there are more awards to win and although it's been some years since I was there, I did recognise about a half dozen of my favourite beers in the Belgian league. I didn't recognize that many in the English competition though, which shows how much the craft beers movement has expanded in recent years.

This is a must-read if your tastes in beer extend beyond the brands that your parents drank and which still command the media. There are literally thousands of labels awaiting your attention. Although beer prices are increasing, collecting and tasting beers is always going to be far less expensive as a hobby than collecting wines, and in my experience, just as satisfying if not more so (and you can actually drink the beers, too!). And if you're accustomed to drinking Bud, or indeed anything at all from that stable (only one of the Anheuser beers made it over 3 out of 5), you could be in for a very pleasant surprise. Don't be put off by the fancy descriptions though, you don't really have to detect the. What was it now... hint of wood, leather and banana in the background. Just enjoy.

I only had a fairly short time to look at this, but there aren't the the number of complaints that you would expect if the site were a known ripoff. The site and the owner aren't entirely complaint-free, but I don't think this is a deliberate attempt to scam everyone.

The owner is an Australian who seems to have a solid reputation within the unlocking community; that suggests people are generally happy to deal with him. Other than that I can tell you that freely published information suggests that the site is run out of a Chinese restaurant in Spain; I couldn't comment on the validity of that.

If you want to find out more personal information about this person, it's pretty simple, but in this case there doesn't seem to be any need for me to post it here.

My rating is based on my not being able to tell whether this is a cool site or not, and not having any reason to hate it either. I would like to use a different term than "Meh" but none are available (yet).

It appears to be run by the Beijing Dayang International-trading Co. Ltd, if that indeed is a legal entity at all. Other sites these people run or have run previously include mall-nice.com, true668.com, sell-good.com, buy-hot.com, and cher-shop.com. They also have listed their address as a branch of the Bank of China.

As an aside I noted they'd pinched or borrowed some material from a company called Shenzen Dayi, who have an address in Shenzhen city, completely different place. So I had a very quick look at them in passing and they don't have what you'd call an impressive trading history either. And to show you how tangled these things are, although it's a Chinese company with Chinese sites and the owner uses an English name, the contact, if you look in the right places, is a Latvian.

Anyway, is this other company "legit"? Yes, from a Chinese trader's point of view. From your point of view, probably not, as by "legit" I assume you mean "are the goods authentic originals", which I am 100% certain they aren't. Did you need to ask? Probably not, but you'd be surprised just how many people are still handing over money to companies like this. They churn out a stream of fly-by-night, badly designed and badly written websites that you never dream of trading with if they were in the USA and/or charging the right prices. They have no obligation at all to send you anything, because they're so far away that you can't do a thing if they don't. And if they get too high a profile on sites like this, they just open up under a different domain name.

Hopefully, more people here in the West are catching on. But we need to keep up the pressure and try to get the message out as often as possible.

Typical Chinese fakery, this time from someone known only as "jerme" and who gives his address as Room 1107, 12 haishanxijie, huanshixiroad, Guangzhou, Beijing. Not an address likely to fill you with confidence that the Nike delivery truck is going to be dropping off a stack of genuine Air Jordans any time soon.

The business name that appears on your bank statement if you do choose to deal with this site is stated on the front page: ZJ Xunjie Network S&T Shenzhen. That's a Chinese currency exchange outfit. So, at least two warnings that you're dealing with a Chinese person.

The same guy / business runs another site at www.mostkicks.com, which has a smarter and more convincing template, but then gives the game away with its struggle to speak English:

"Jordan shoes nike company's products from one of the country for so many people like Michael Jordan. So the Michael Jordan funs like the jordans shoes so much."

I think that says it all.

ALL such businesses sell only counterfeits. Please also see:
http://www.sitejabber.com/forum/advice-on-websites/can-anybody-tell-me-about-www-uggfactorystore-com/37

(Reviewed by request)

There seemed to be a few moans about the service here, going back a few years. Not enough to call it a scam or anything at that level, just some unhappy customers. Then I found a bunch more, and more recently, here:

http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/review/www.swisstool.co.uk

There does seem to be an awful lot happening at this address. The parent company is called The Maybe Group, coincidentally also at this address, and their director is listed as one Hamid Moosavi, whose email address is at swisstool.co.uk and coincidentally also turns up as the address for Mr. Moosavi in his alter ego as technical contact for a site called bsgoa.com, the home of Bruce Smith's Gallery Of Amazements. Mr. Smith, a magician of repute, has a site created by Mr Moosavi and would have no other connection to this but for his email address, which is also listed as belonging to swisstool.co.uk, which I think we can speculate is run by the busy Mr. Moosavi. This led to finding Maybe Design Studio, Internet Web Design & Development company, in the same building as swisstool, along with Maybe Toys toys and games, M T Moosavi & Co Accountants, P A News Centres, Newsagents and off license, and The Streatham Bed Company. There's a photo of the storefront here if you're curious:

http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz_photos/RM9KNMPi5K4RM9ucIdlrAA?select=cFNBZ3fy8-_TOJAKAL-PrA

And according to the local authority the building also includes four apartments. Wow. So, a regular hive of activity, and given all that accounting and toy and game and bed sales and web design and newsagency, no wonder poor old swisstool gets a bit behind, sometimes. And that's important to knife enthusiasts, who are collectors of equal status to, say, numismatists or philatelists and, given the nature of their collections, are probably best not angered.

I can't show you the picture here but the "sales office located in beautiful town of Chicago" doesn't look very hopeful as a sales office and the surroundings aren't very beautiful. The telephone number is that of a residential apartment address in another part of Chicago, registered to Bonnie Campbell, 1455 W Roscoe St.

Additionally the site has been running for only about a week yet the company claims warehouses all over the USA and Europe. They have no credit card processing facility, highly suspect in this business and especially as arranging this facility is really very simple these days for even an amateur startup.

Lastly there are grammatical clues in the site texts that suggest English may not be the first language of the writer. Tending to confirm the theory, big chunks of their terms and conditions have been copied from other sites.

This is beginning to spell S-C-A-M but so far, proof is circumstantial. It looks like it may be an European operation and that tends to suggest counterfeit products. The very low prices suggest counterfeits too.

If you asked me to speculate on gut feelings alone I'd say this was one to stay away from. The prices are very, very low and that usually means counterfeits. I suspect that within the next month or so, feedback from customers will be more frequent and we can see what's really going on here. Meanwhile, I'd wait. However desperate you are for that camera, it'll still be here in a month's time.

This looks great, not only the capacity to emulate many browsers, but a whole bunch of additional fun and games (literally). You just need to install a plug-in and off you go.

Unfortunately the privacy policy sucks. They need to work on the conditions under which they can release personal information before I install this plugin. Which gets a "MEH" from me, for the time being.