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expedia
personal finance
Review Of Mint.com's New Investment-Tracking Features
I got to check out personal finance management site Mint.com's new investment-tracking component before the private beta launches tomorrow. You can now add Brokerage, IRA, 401k and 529 assets. The two biggest things it offers are line graphs, and a way to see all the fees, dividends, deposits and withdrawals in one, clear, organized window. Unlike with the credit card tracking, they don't seem to be making any suggestions about how you might save money by switching to a different investment firm. You also can't yet push assets between accounts through Mint. As before, you will have to give up your username and password to your various financial services to let Mint scrape the data. The new brokerage features are hardly mind-blowing, but by having investment-tracking now Mint can basically be your entire financial dashboard, you just can't touch all the levers yet. Sexy screenshots, inside... More »
Adobe has joined FotoFlexer, Rsizr, and Piknic to offer a free online image editor, Photoshop Express. ArsTechnica says it's pretty good for a cross-platform browser app, although it's got some limitations in this beta launch. (Currently US only.) [ArsTechnica]
trademarks
Plastic Surgery Company Sues Consumer Site For Negative Customer Reviews
Lifestyle Lift claims it's a "minor one-hour procedure with major results," but a lot of customers who have paid for the procedure have been left unhappy, and they've consequently posted reviews about it on a plastic surgery review blog called RealSelf. Lifestyle Lift has sued RealSelf, claiming trademark infringement, and now RealSelf has countersued, claiming Lifestyle Lift padded RealSelf's site with shill reviews. More »
ratings
America's Test Kitchen Picks The Best Commuter Mugs
While watching TV yesterday and moaning about how lazy we are, we saw a review of commuter mugs (free registration required) on "America's Test Kitchen": "We ordered 11 mugs of different materials, shapes, and sipping structures and organized a battery of tests designed to define the ideal mug, which left us feeling a little like test drivers as we careened around corners trying to spill the coffee or dislodge the mugs." (Yes, they like the royal "we" too!) See their testing criteria, as well as their top two picks, bottom rung losers, and oddball favorite after the jump. More »
tourism
NYC's New High-Tech Public Bathroom Is Freaky, Robotic
For years, New York City was a grim place to be when you had to use the bathroom, since there are almost no public facilities (not counting Starbucks). But earlier this month the first of 20 high-tech pay toilets opened in the city, in Madison Square Park just north of 23rd Street. Now the next time you visit the city and need to answer nature's call, grab a quarter and head over there to experience the strange combination of a $100,000 prison cell/car wash/elevator/Louvre. It's the cheapest "experience" you'll probably find in the city. More »
travel
Is Expedia Censoring Negative Reviews?
Christopher Elliott has an interesting post about an Expedia customer ran into trouble getting his negative review posted to the site. Bob, the customer in question, says:More »
Expedia flatly refused to post my review. I have followed their rules, but they have repeatedly told me they won't post it because I'm not following the rules. They will not tell me which rule I didn't follow.
reviews
In MP3 Showdown, Winners Are iPod Touch And Sansa View
Okay, so it's not like there aren't 15,000 MP3-player reviews already on the web, but SmartMoney decided to jump on the bandwagon and rate five 8-gigabyte MP3 players. Instead of hard stats and lab tests, they handed the devices to an NYU music instructor and audiophile and asked him to walk around the city playing with them. The Apple iPod Touch—at $300, the most expensive of the lot—came out on top, which probably doesn't surprise anyone, but the SanDisk Sansa View performed well too. More »
books
The Fakery Behind Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers"
Amazon reviews, especially the effusive ones, have always been suspect—you never know when a five-star review came from an employee, publicist, or marketing type. Slate describes the dishonest world of Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers," where a small group of writers churn out purple-prosed blurbs and jacket-ready compliments at an astounding rate, sometimes for a fee. In turn, these reviewers are inundated with a sort of fame as well as free merchandise—mostly books in the past, but now electronics and other goods. Because good reviews sell more books, Amazon has no incentive to weed out the reviewers who have turned the system into a cottage industry. We suggest you disregard any review with a "Top 10 Reviewer" label on it. More »
marketing
If The Critic Doesn't Say Exactly What You Want, Change It
Speaking of blurbs and quote-whores, Gelf Magazine has compiled a list of the most egregiously misrepresented blurbs cherry-picked from various reviews last year. More »
departures
Maxim Fires Peter Hammond, Movie Critic Shill Extraordinaire
As far as we are concerned, the function of a movie critic is to let you know (in as entertaining way), whether or not you should drop your hard earned cash to see a movie in a theater, if you should wait for cable, or if you should run screaming in the opposite direction. More »
marketplace of ideas
How Do You Get The Most Out Of Online Reviews?
Products don't advertise their drawbacks leaving shoppers to rely on online reviews as one of the only ways to determine a product's true worth. Salon argues in an article heavy on fluff and light on content that reviews are just a meaningless muddle of questionable opinions. We disagree, but the article does raise one good question: how do you judge the value online reviews? More »
lawsuits
InfomercialScams.com Gets Sued Constantly
Over at the Consumer Law & Policy blog there is a post about the legal troubles of Justin Leonard, the owner of InfomercialScams.com, a site that posts unedited reviews of various infomercial products. More »
gifts
10 Magazine Gift Guides Reviewed & Ranked
You're busy: you don't have time to shop, or to read magazines, or to look at magazines for ideas to guide you when you go shopping, which you're not going to do because you're too busy. Luckily Slate has pre-digested the gift guides from ten magazines including Vogue, Maxim, Consumer Reports, and Gourmet, then barfed them up like an HTML mama bird for your shopping convenience. More »
ethics
Did CNET's Gamespot Fire Reviewer For Angering Advertisers?
So much for even the illusion of editorial independence in video game reviews. One of Gamespot's editors and top reviewers was apparently fired this week after writing an unenthusiastic review for the game "Kane & Lynch," which was being advertised heavily all over the Gamespot site, according to our sister site Kotaku.More »
amazon
Find Out How It Sucks
HowItSucks.com is an interesting project that scrapes just the negative consumer electronic productive reviews from Amazon.com. Search by type or brand, and a red bar shows you how much it "sucks," based on the negative feedback. Pass the mouse over the item and the popup lists the essential statement from three of the reviews. Could be an interesting tool for comparison shopping. Negative reviews are a good starting point if you're trying to choose between similar products. You always need to be a critical reader, though. I bought an iPod sports band once and on the Apple site were all these people complaining about how it was too big and was falling off their arm. I then thought about how a number of Apple users are very picky and have twig-like bodies, whereas I have chunky biceps. I bought the sport-band and it fit perfectly.
How It Sucks [Official Site]
personal finance
A Casual Review Of Mint.com
Michelle Slatalla, the Erma Bombeck-David Pogue hybrid who writes casual articles about the Internet for the average person (she's the mom who pestered her daughter on Facebook this past summer), has published a Chatty Cathy review of personal finance site Mint.com. Her verdict: it's nice to not have to go to multiple sites; the aggregated information is a good feature; security worried her at first, but she's okay now that she knows Mint is a read-only site and they don't have her account numbers, just user names and passwords; and she has actually used the ads that Mint displays—not to open new lines of credit, but to negotiate lower interest rates for existing accounts. More »
Shopping for a bookworm, and can't afford the Amazon Kindle? The New York Times lists 100 notable books published over the last year. [New York Times]
