Chris O.

I'd lay odds this is a basic online store template with a few custom bits dropped in, and not very successfully at that. A store that tells you it's "five star rated" but not by whom, is immediately suspicious. It's all very cheaply put together, with many blank pages for goods categories provided by the template, but not used by the site, and doesn't look remotely like the sort of place that stocks expensive cameras and audio goods. It looks a lot more like a front for an individual using a dropshipper, I don't get the sense that there's a real company behind this. Given the number of reputable stores dealing in cameras and electronics, I can't see any reason to choose this one.

The Neuber company sells a replacement for the standard Windows task manager, which provides much more information about running processes and also assesses their potential as security risks. I don't have it myself but have seen it running, and it does a better job than Windows alone.

However, the other, and very helpful use for this site is that it lists all known Windows processes that you might find running in the background and potentially slowing down your machine. You may even have an unwelcome visitor or two that haven't been picked up by your anti-virus programs.

The site also allows users to post their own information about processes, which is better than just relying on a commercial source, I think.

Many Windows processes and services are unnecessary in most or all cases of home use, and can be shut down or removed to increase performance. This is a good place to discover what those obscure names in Task Manager mean, and from here you can then pursue further inquiries of your own into whether it's safe to shut them down.

Google launched its new URL-shortening service to the public a couple of weeks back and it offers some current and potential features that are likely to encourage many users to leave services such as bit.ly, which claims that Google has simply copied most of their ideas, anyway.

A URL-shortener helps people cope with the awfully long addresses generated by sites these days. In fact, you may notice some pretty long and mysterious addresses here on SiteJabber too, sometimes. Whilst there's nothing intrinsically wrong or bad about them, try fitting one into a tweet, or a forum posting. And don't even bother suggesting that someone copy them down by hand. Sharing them by any means is a pain, even if it's practical.

Enter URL shortening. The concept is simple: type any URL (web address) into a box, hit the button, and back comes a different, and much smaller URL that still takes people to the same place when they click on it. In other words, the service creates an index of new URLs that point to the old ones. And an infinite number of new URLs may point to one address, since many people all around the world may be asking for short URLs that take their clickers to the same final destination.

USER ---> short URL -----> translation ------> original long URL ---> destination

Or

USER ---> short URL a ------|
USER ---> short URL b ------| ----> translation --> same long URL ---> destination
USER ---> short URL c ------|

All this has to be transparent, too, so that using a short URL is no slower than going directly to the original address.

You're relying on the URL shortening service to be around a long time, of course, and you're also trusting them to keep their service up and running 24/7, reliably. So the first thing commercial users of a service are looking for is a reliable brand name. And the second, is some history to prove that the administrators of the service can keep it running.

Now then, let's think. What would be a hugely popular brand, with a history of running servers efficiently 24/7?

Enter Google, with their new service at goo. Gl. And they have some added value services, too. Every time a person clicks on one of their links, the data is saved, and the person who created that link can see how many people have used it. Very cool. Now, I can get the sort of data that only webmasters once had.

I gather goo. Gl is also going to be offering data on the operating systems and web browsers of goo. Gl URL clickers, once again, very useful data if you're a web designer.

But what people will be waiting for is to see how far Google will take this in integrating existing services such as Google Analytics. It seems unlikely that they can screw this up, unless people decide they don't like the goo. Gl /xxxx URL format.

At the moment, all click statistics are going to be available to the public. So anyone can see how popular anyone else's links are. Whether that remains the case, if there are businesses out there willing to pay for secrecy, we shall have to wait and see.

Social networking for consumers. Swipely collects the purchase data from members' credit card and debit card transactions, both online and offline, and members choose which to post as "Swipes". Your friends (imported from Facebook if you wish) may all comment and like your Swipes, and do all those social networking things you do in social networking.

The scheme has been in a private beta for a year but has just gone public and is free to join. It's the first attempt that I know of to use your actual purchasing data as a basis for a social network, and if you think that telling the world what you own and where you buy it is a great basis for making new friends, then you'll love this. However, there are limits, so you can't reveal how much you paid as part of your Swipe, though I guess you can do it as a comment.

The plan is clearly to make the whole thing a lot of fun, in pursuit of which you will be able to win badges, become VIPs at certain stores, get offers of discounts, and so on.

Unfortunately the Swipely site offers hardly any information as yet, and I had to resort to other sources to understand what it's about (which I may still not, so please correct me if you know better). Once it's off the ground properly, though, it could well be the next Big Thing in social networking. The developers must think so, because they're already partnering with the major financial institutions and thousands of online and offline outlets. They're all veterans of other, bigger and more successful online ventures such as Ebay and PayPal, too, so they should have a good sense of the potential here.

[edit]

After writing this I found blippy.com, which is another interpretation of social networking using purchasing data:

http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.blippy.com

This is the official American National Gallery of Art website. It's unexpectedly conservative for an arts site, a minimalist style that you may or may not appreciate, but at least that makes it a fast loader. The page background is uniformly white, not a color generally best suited to displaying all images, but the decision not to use black does mean we don't have to struggle to read colored text.

Everything is pretty well organized and there are no nods to Web 2.0 here, as yet, so you just point and click what you want to see or where you want to go, often on a purely textual link, or intuitively, on an image. Instead of opting for a style based on virtual tours, the site is arranged and displayed much more like a print-based guide or catalog.

It's not common for a site to choose Quicktime to display movies when Flash is available, but that's what has been chosen here, ensuring that video downloaders designed to capture material from YouTube-like sites are out of luck. And QT may stream very slowly, making for a longer wait than you expect from Flash. However, at least one of the Firefox downloaders will handle QT so check that out if you prefer, or need, to download and watch offline. One way or another, the various video podcasts here should be available to all, with a little preparation.

The site has a somewhat academic feel, without being too pretentious about it. It's quite heavy on text, sometimes offering more than a screenful of information about one work, and although the language is often scholarly it's also quite accessible. If you find an artists' work inartistic, or his motives unfathomable, the commentaries here do help you to see more objectively.

Those of us with photographic interests will also find a significant collection here including the works of Fox Talbot, dating back to 1834. Truly historic, as well as historical.

If you're looking for a gallery site that doesn't place content after style in the interests of popularization, this is one you'll enjoy.

Reuters (pronounced 'roy-ters') is a British company which began reporting on the stock exchange and world financial markets, before branching out into the wider field of international news reporting and achieving status alongside such giants as CNN. It is now owned by a Canadian company, though it continues to have a headquarters building in London and others in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

It claims to take its objectivity very seriously, though recently it was caught faking images of a confrontation in the middle east in order, apparently, to put the Israelis in a better light. I'm not going to get into that one, other than to observe that in my opinion the news is rarely what it seems to be, regardless of who is reporting it.

Reuters continues to place emphasis on reporting business and financial news, as you'll see from the main heading topics on the front page of the site. But it has also lost its fair share of war correspondents in the call of duty, demonstrating that its focus has widened very considerably over the years.

There are several national editions of the site, and it should automatically detect which one is right for you. If not, you can choose from a list of editions in a drop down menu at the top of the page.

I couldn't say whether Reuters' brand of reporting is more or less objective than anyone else's, you'll have to make up your mind on that one. But I do like the way they present the news, with little or no sensationalism and in a clean, tidy format that loads quickly even on my slow laptop. Well worth a look if you've not got your news from here before.

Forbes online touts itself as "home page for the world's business leaders", and such it may be, but if you don't happen to be a world business leader - and let's face it, if you're reading one of my reviews you probably aren't - don't let that put you off. Forbes does devote considerable space to business and high finance, but it also reports on anything in life which has some economical interest or significance. And that's just about everything, when you come to think of it. For example, the current issue has an article about Lady Gaga, not something you'd expect to find in, say, The Financial Times, and frankly it's a gossip article too, but the reason it's there is because it involves her earnings. And that gives Forbes the excuse to write about it. Oh, yes, and what are her earnings, I hear you cry? Sixty-two million, last year, estimated. Not bad. But no need for Oprah to start worrying about her position at the top of the celebs annual earnings table, clocking in at an astonishing $315 million.

(Intriguing or obscene, depending on your standpoint, the list of the wealthiest and most socially sought-after is here:
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/53/celeb-100-10_The-Celebrity-100.html)

Forbes is a surprisingly wide and varied venue and well worth spending some time looking around, even if you don't think a magazine for business leaders has anything in it for you. It's an icon of capitalism, though, and as such it may offend some by its absorbing interest in money, and for good reason. If you fall into that category you don't have to visit, of course, but on the other hand it's always worth seeing what the enemy is thinking.

This is a pretty fair review site if you're looking for the lowdown on a new notebook, laptop or netbook. I have not used the other categories myself so I will leave them for others.

Although the reviews tend to be comprehensive and take the time to include "synthetic" benchmarks (theoretical performance, rather than using specific applications), I have a small complaint in that the machines used for the benchmarking comparisons are not always the ones I'd expect to see, and may change from one benchmark to another. So, for example, you may see a machine you are interested in compared with one set of competitors for performance, but a different set for another parameter. It makes it a little harder to get a quick comparison than I would like.

I also noted that despite Lenovo occupying almost all of the current top positions in the league table, they weren't appearing that much in the benchmarking. I would have expected, given that these machines are apparently ones that attract the most interest, others would be compared to them more frequently.

Minor issues, really. As is my main complaint, which isn't minor if you're using a relatively slow system on a public wifi network (as many if not all netbook users will be): the site loading is badly delayed by ads and ad servers. Not only did I have to manually dismiss a page-sized ad just to get into the site, but then I had to wait for Google syndication, doubleclick and other ad servers to be connected up. All this takes unnecessary time unless you're at home or office on a faster network. And once there, a couple or three inches at the end of the page are devoted to loads of Google ads too. I know it's to be expected, since the failure of banner advertising to raise revenue alone, but I have to wonder just what percentage of the visitors to this site is going to welcome and use all or any of those ads, compared to the percentage for whom it is more irritating than anything. I knocked off a star for it, anyway, patience never having been a virtue of mine.

If you think of rain when someone mentions torrents, this is probably not for you. Yes, it's another one of those naughty file-sharing sites, this time exclusively offering links to torrent files rather than direct downloads at places such as Hotfile.

This is one of the oldest file sharing sites exclusively dedicated to television series. Currently, there are around 400 shows listed. Also useful, there's background information and news, and status indicators show you when a series is showing, resting, or departed the airwaves for good. There's a calendar to remind you what's on tonight or tomorrow, and a countdown list showing how long you have to wait for your favorite series to return. An active forum rounds out the site.

Google will help you find a torrent client, or if you already have a download manager you may find it will handle torrent files already. And try to remember to share your downloads so that you give something back to the torrent community.

Downloading copyright material is illegal so all I can do is observe that this site is there. Whatever you do with that knowledge is entirely up to you.

This is a neat, small and useful application if you often need to work with text files in different formats, or even just keep up with Microsoft's frequent and probably irritating changes in document formats without spending big bucks on new office suites.

The FREE TextMaker viewer opens, displays and prints documents in the following formats:. Docx,. Docm Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. Sxw OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Text. Dotx,. Dotm Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 templates. Rtf Rich Text Format. Doc Microsoft Word 6.0 up to Word 2010. Psw Pocket Word (Pocket PC). Dot Microsoft Word templates 6.0 up to 2010. Pwd Pocket Word (Handheld PC). Tmd TextMaker 6.0 up to 2010. Htm/html HTML documents. Odt OpenDocument Text. Txt Text files (DOS, Windows, Unicode, UTF-8)

And that's likely to cover every document reading and printing requirement of the average user, with the exception of the Adobe Acrobat PDF format which isn't strictly a word-processing document format. However, plenty of free PDF readers abound on the web already, the most well-known and recommended being Foxit Reader, and the Foxit range of paid products includes everything you need to read, create and print in the PDF format. Foxit is at http://www.foxitsoftware.com.

If you want to investigate the company which produces the free document viewer further, you'll find that the free viewer/printer is a loss-leader to promote SoftMaker Office, a full office suite for Windows, Windows portable and Linux which incorporates the same technology and which can be found at http://www.softmaker.com/english/of_en.htm. My review of that site may be found at:

http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.softmaker.com

I'm not a member or contributor to this site, so the previous reviewer's vitriolic attack means nothing to me. It might be accurate, I don't know. I just wanted to review the site as a reader, and as a reader, this is a decent site to wander around if you're interested in 'alternative topics' such as aliens, 911 theories, 2012 end-of-the-world predictions, the IIluminati (mustn't leave out the Illuminati), the paranormal, creationism, metaphysics, and general esoterica and conspiracy theories of all flavors. There is a huge and active forum here and not everyone writing for it is barmy.

I can't guarantee you'll find anything to agree with here, or even anything intelligent enough to get your attention; it all depends on your point of view. If you come here looking for cranky ideas to make fun of, or to justify your own conviction that conspiracy theorists are all loonies, you'll probably find just as much to interest you as if you'd come with an open mind looking for new ideas to explore. If you decide to jump in and contribute, maybe you'll let us know if you get a fair deal. But me, I'll stick to being an observer here. Too many of my friends are crazy as it is.

Here we have a site which lists and frequently comments on more than twenty-six thousand movies, supported by more than forty thousand members. New movies are being listed and reviewed at a rate of maybe fifty a day with the unfaltering enthusiasm of many contributors, so you might find yourself asking why you haven't come across this one before. And there's a likely reason for that.

SurrealMoviez is no mainstream site, you see, it's non-profit, has no advertising and keeps itself to itself; so much so, that you have to sign up as a member before you can see the content at all. And it's run by the members, for the members, with no obvious administrative interference. It offers a range of content so eclectic that it's probably unique, but it's also skating on the edge of the law because it's listing files that have, in almost all cases, been illegally uploaded to the web. They are mainly commercial, copyright material, and although it's entirely legal to provide links to their locations on other sites, often in other countries, in most cases it's not legal for you to download and watch them or redistribute them to your friends or other web sites.

So the site is not breaking any laws, yet, though that may one day change if the entertainment industry's professional associations and other establishment organizations can influence international law sufficiently. Meanwhile, it's left entirely up to you, the visitor, to choose whether you want to download anything from anywhere and do anything with it. Nobody wants to know about that, it's your business.

Enough said. I'm not here to argue a case for or against file sharing, I just needed to get the subject out of the way before someone else brought it up.

As for the content of the site, it's a movie student's dream. While most of the listed material is not, strictly speaking, surreal, you are going to find movies here which are so rare that the chances of you accidentally discovering an online copy yourself are remote. You will find material from many countries, and in many languages, too, and there's a fair share of independent and experimental material alongside the commercial offerings. I don't know of another single venue where you can find substantial material dating back to the turn of the twentieth century alongside the most avant-garde contemporary experimentation, or where censorship, be it political or moral, plays no part in the choice of material offered for review and comment.

I would suggest that if you have any interest in learning about movies, beyond going to watch Avatar or the latest teen vampire flick, you'll find a lot to interest you here even if you aren't tempted to download and watch any movies yourself. By all means, if a movie reviewed here looks interesting, go buy it if you can find it. But you don't have to, and just reading about some of the more obscure movies is fascinating in itself. If you've never really explored the world of cinema beyond Hollywood or your own nation's commercial output, there's a good chance you'll be amazed at the sheer volume and range of material that never gets that kind of publicity. If you have a particular field of interest already, you'll almost certainly find something new here whether you're interested in silent movies, Chinese tragedies, German politics or Polish romances, lewd movies of the '60s or cartoons of the '80s.

It's not IMDb, and I'd be disingenuous if I suggested that most people didn't come here to download movies and watch them, as well as researching and reading about them. It would be nice not to have to be distracted by the file sharing debate, and simply recommend a site such as this for the sheer range and usefulness of its content, but that debate isn't going to go away; I suspect that however punitive future internet laws may become, file sharing is and will remain an intrinsic part of the fabric of the web and it will always have its supporters and opponents. And that makes it challenging to review a site like this without causing some readers to feel that by the act of review some illegal activity is being promoted or encouraged, but you'll have to make up your own mind on that one.

It's a cool idea to offer your unwanted stuff for free, and have the opportunity to get other people's unwanted stuff for free, and do both at the same venue. And that's what this project is about. And it seems to have plans for global domination too, as you have an opportunity to become "the most generous person on Earth", perhaps somewhat of an overstatement, but they mean well.

This has a neat, visual interface which employs mapping and an overlay to show where the offers are. And just for fun, there's a Stats feature so you can keep track of your activities, as well as seeing how other people are doing, and how much stuff has been given away in your country, or the entire world - but only at this website, of course.

It's an ambitious idea that's at a very early stage, which probably explains why the "most generous person in the USA" right now is a user called "annoyed".

To be fair it only launched in November as a 'beta' so it's very, very new. Its initial and ongoing challenge will be to attract enough users to populate the site with freebies, and in the USA at least, it has to get people's attention away from similar facilities offered by Craigslist and the local newspapers.

Even if the idea is fine, its success, if it comes, is still fraught with problems. We don't live in a moneyless society. There will be many people very happy to take away others' unwanted stuff, and then sell it. There will be concerns that charities are losing out because people are giving directly to others, instead of donating to thrift stores. Although moneyless living has been tried on a very small scale, it will always run into problems when it impacts on a society which isn't geared up for generosity, barter or the free exchange of goods and services.

So I wouldn't look for or expect tremendous things from this idea, but it may still achieve enough to provide some folks with things they couldn't otherwise afford, and provide the givers with a sense of social responsibility too. That can't be a bad thing.

Conceived in 1996 and still going strong, Vincent Flanders' website is something of an internet icon. It helped me design my first websites and it's probably helped thousands of others avoid the most serious of web design pitfalls over the years too - not by dry academic instruction, but by the bad examples set by others.

It walks a narrow line. On one side, the humor that comes from finding a genuinely sucky example of web design - especially if it's allegedly professional too - is based on the banana skin principle: not only is there always something just ahead that will bring you down if you don't pay attention, but the rest of the world will collapse in laughter when it happens.

In this case, that banana skin is the limitless potential of self-publication, which offers all sorts of disasters in the making for an overenthusiastic or under-prepared web page creator. And when he falls, whether by creating something unreadable, unviewable, impossible to navigate, or just totally over the top, we laugh. And it's up to our own honesty with ourselves to decide whether that's a friendly laugh or a mean, patronizing one.

On the other side, studying mistakes, either other people's or one's own, not only improves the viewer's skills, it really does improve the standards of web design in a broader way too. Many site designers, once they know their site is featured here, go back and do a redesign that works better. Of course many don't, as well, which means that their examples of the worst kind of online publication are there still, to educate more of us. But even if one bad site becomes a good one, that's progress.

Generally, the site stays somewhere in the safe zone which leaves you, the viewer, to get from it what you will - laughs, education, or both. It's been useful and popular enough to spawn a couple of books and go through many design changes itself, over the years, and even the development of Web 2.0, with its characteristic minimalism and complex scripting, hasn't prevented a wealth of ongoing suckiness out there.

It's a heads-up to publishers in the most direct way, telling them to remember that they're supposed to be designing for the public, not for themselves, and attempting to soften the blow of criticism with a smile. If you're a designer and you're sucky, be afraid - Vincent Flanders will find you...

Being a thrift store scrounger, I often pick up ancient peripherals for my PC and sometimes they've been abandoned by their makers for so long that the drivers are no longer available - except here. The site boasts about 1.5 million drivers, ranging from the latest to the antique. There are two levels of paid membership, and a basic free mambership that offers limited access to their database. The free membership has worked fine for me so far and I can run 5 or 6 year old devices which I've dug out of bargain bins. I'd definitely look here before looking anywhere else if the drivers you're looking for are no longer officially supported.

FYI the person who runs this one is on Twitter, you might want to have a word with him?

http://twitter.com/apoorvgadwal

Anyone having a bad experience + a Twitter account will know what to Tweet about, and maybe if you draw his attention to this page you might get him to sort your problem out for you. Worth a try, in any case.

[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

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.

If TinEye succeeds in indexing the web quickly enough, it'll be able to offer unmatched image recognition technology in a usable form. They're aiming to compare any image that you upload or point them to with every other image out there and tell you where it's already appeared - every single duplicate of that image, even if it's been modified subsequently, which is, you must admit, dead clever. The engine is not able to handle face recognition, though, and typically returns exact matches, not similar images.

If successful, it will help copyright owners to find unauthorized copies of their work, and help out folks like us who are trying to figure out if a site is authentic, by letting us see if images are original or not. It will find higher or lower resolutions of the same image. It will help identify the subject of an image that has no description, and so on. Registered users may save their searches and registration is free, though the engine is available to anyone and anyone can recommend a site to be indexed.

Currently they've already indexed over a billion images and that number is constantly increasing. It sounds a lot, but it's a tiny percentage of the images to be found out there (Photobucket alone hosts more than 8 billion images), and that figure is growing all the time too. You may strike lucky already, but don't be discouraged if you're unsuccessful. Bookmark this one for a return trip a little further down the line.

There is a version for the iPhone (naturally) and a useful plug-in for Firefox that adds a search option to the right-click menu.

For people who can see a use for this, it's going to be a great asset for sure.

Chinese counterfeiter. The usual cautions apply.