The Consumer’s Corner

This one was so much fun to research! Have you been considering moving into a brand new community? You know that the real estate agent is going to tell you all the neighbors are perfect citizens, and most of them sing in the Church choir. But you and I both know that is just a huge load of crap. So where do you have to go to find the real deal on what is going on behind those strange looking people’s walls? Rotten Neighbor dot com.

I checked out my own neighborhood on Rotten Neighbor, and it had already been tagged several times; quite accurately I might add. I left a tag or two myself, and definitely plan on leaving more later. I just couldn’t wait to start the article and let everyone know about this service.

The mapping system runs off of Google maps, using the satellite, map, or hybrid views. I’ll assume it updates as often as Google does, but I really have no way of verifying that. Anyways, if you’re familiar with Google’s wonderful map service, you’ll feel right at home at Rotten Neighbor. If you’ve never used Google maps, you’ll catch on quick, and you’ll love it. Quite addicting.

Rotten Neighbor requires (a fairly painless) registration, but the comments you leave can stay anonymous (thank God). Most definitely a good thing. I recommend going and checking this out immediately; you might be surprised what you learn!

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

real estate, social network, tagging, maps

I am a very active participant in both of the biggest social networks (MySpace and Facebook), and if you get online much, you probably are as well. These social networks, along with a few others, are taking over the internet. It’s nearly gotten to the point that is as important to have an account at these sites as it is to have email. No reason not to have both, but for arguments sake, let’s say you can only pick one; which do you choose?

MySpace Pros

• Nearly Infinite customization options. Everything in the areas of colors, backgrounds, fonts, and over all style is user controlled. An entire (profitable) industry has been born dedicated to providing CSS layouts and other all types of other niceties for MySpace pages. Plus, with a tiny bit of html know how, you can make your own stuff, and express your artistic side.
• Privacy. It’s true that by using a tool or two a power user can still look at a lot of stuff you decide to hide, such as comments. But to keep away the prying eyes of the general populous, inserting a little piece of code into your ‘About Me’ is usually enough to make sure you keep your business your business.
• Awesome network of musicians and film makers. MySpace brings with it a video hosting section that could rival YouTube, and the music selection is astonishing. Many independent bands get discovered there, and it’s one of the best ways I’ve found to discover lesser known artists.
• Blogs. I’m all about blogging (duh!), and no blogging system is easier to use than MySpace’s. That’s where I really caught ‘the bug;’ I still update it, and I probably always will. It’s my ‘personal’ blog, and I like it being where all my online friends can have easy access to it, but strangers wandering in from Google cannot.

MySpace Cons

• Ads are freaking everywhere, some of them being quite adult in nature. Not a place I recommend for young kids (10 and younger). Others are just very annoying; they flash and make noise. I hate that.
• To get the most out of the service, you kind of have to learn some simple html. This is kind of a pro as well as a con, html is something that’s good to learn a little bit about, but it can certainly be tricky for those that are not especially computer literate.
• Spam. Especially geared towards young men. Expect porn invites daily, unless you make your profile private. This has gotten better (a lot better), but it’s not gone by any means.
• All the things that make some of the sites look so great; pictures, videos, music, etc. can really bog down a slower dial-up internet connection. Dial ups are becoming less and less common, but a great many people still use them.

Facebook Pros

• Super simple, and incredibly easy to use. Just fill out the forms, and you’re done. You can’t change things like your font, background, etc, so you’re good to go within a couple of minutes.
• Far less spam. I’ve been registered and active for several months, and I’ve never received anything that even resembles spam.
• Being nosy. Some people just like to know who said what, and when. Facebook gives you a ‘news’ feed of all of your friends activities. As long as two people are friends of yours, you can see what they’re saying to each other on their Wall’s, Pokes, etc.
• Third party developers are creating interesting little applications to help you personalize your page a bit, and many of them are very creative.

Facebook Cons

• At the core, all the pages look exactly the same. Some are just more cluttered than others. This removes a lot of your ability to use it as a medium to express yourself. You can add applications, but all that’s really doing is adding an extra box to your page.
• Keeping your privacy. You have to jump through a couple hoops to keep your stuff from showing up on friend’s feeds. Not cool at all. It should be the other way around; you should have to give permission.
• TMI. It can be annoying looking at your feed, and seeing a hundred instances of ‘x is now friends with x.’
• No true blogging options. Boo!

I like both, I’ll continue to use both (a lot), but if I had to choose one and only one one, I’d have to choose MySpace. I’m a creative individual, and MySpace allows me the tools to be creative. Regardless of which you choose, the best thing about both sites; they’re free! You’ll have hours, or in my case years, of good times. Can’t beat that!

MySpace.Com

Facebook.com

–Jeremy Hobbs

web 2.0, facebook, myspace, social networking

Do you ever sit up late at night on the internet, really bored? You’ve checked out all of your favorite websites, some of them twice, and there’s just nothing left to do? Wish there was some way to ‘channel surf’ the internet, like your TV? Not just randomly either, but surf in a way that your beloved computer knows what you like to look at, goes out and finds it especially for you, and then delivers it straight to your screen at the simple push of a button? Yeah? You do? Well, you’re lazy.

Totally kidding. But that fantasy service does really exist, and it’s called StumbleUpon!, or Stumble for short. Stumble is a tool bar that attaches to your browser, Internet Explorer and Firefox (Safari as well? I don’t know, comment me.). You register your account, it’ll ask a few questions about about things you’re interested in, and off you go.

Clicking the ‘Stumble’ button on the tool bar will send you to a site that the service thinks matches your interest criteria. Once you’ve Stumbled, if you like the site you land on, you can (and should) click the ‘Thumbs Up’ button on the bar. If the site sucks, you click ‘Thumbs Down.’ Really complicated stuff, huh? Over a period of time, the program ‘learns’ (it’s smart!) your likes and dislikes, and will more consistently send you to more sites that you’ll love, and fewer that you’ll detest.

You already have favorite sites, right? Go ahead and give them the ‘Thumbs Up,’ this increases those sites ranking with the service, and let’s Stumble know you like that type of material. If it’s never been ‘Thumbed’ before, you can write a brief review of it, tag it to certain interests, ect. There are communities to join where you can share your favorite bookmarks with like minded people, see what the other friendly folks like you have to offer, and so on.

Oh yeah, if you enjoyed this article and end up trying Stumble out, you’ll come back and give Consumer’s Corner the ‘Thumbs Up.’ If you really, really love it, you click the title of each of your favorite articles and ‘Thumb’ that sub page, as well. This helps promote the site, a site you obviously like or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I’m not begging or anything (please, PLease, pretty PLEEEAAASSSEEE!!!!).

They’ve recently added video and picture services (and more) as well, but I’m kind of scared to play with those. I might never leave my computer. Anyway, it’s free, so try it out, and see how it works for you. I’ll never have another browser without it.

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

stumble, stumleupon, social bookmarking, web 2.0

This is a blog, and I’m very well aware that the greatest number of my readers are bloggers as well; a great many of them authoring smaller blogs like mine. As small bloggers, we know that traffic is just incredibly hard to come by unless you’re lucky enough catch a break or two. Now there is a service that’s been designed to help offer that break; BloggingZoom.

Upon first glance, BloggingZoom looks like just another Digg or Reddit clone. The major difference I see is their submission policies; most other social bookmarking services will discourage you from submitting your own content, going as far as to ban their users for doing so. Not BloggingZoom. They’re very open, and that’s a strategy that will help everyone; them, bloggers, and readers. In time BloggingZoom should become a very diverse community, with tons of useful and unique information.

BloggingZoom is built for bloggers, by bloggers, and they truly appreciate the difficulties of driving traffic to your site. With this in mind, they not only have no problem with you submitting your own content/articles, they encourage you to submit them. All of them. On top of that, the system is designed to help your article get ranked higher is Google, offering you residual traffic. Burst traffic is great, but I’d rather have ten new returning visitors than one burst of one hundred hits from people I’ll never see again.

I’d personally recommend limiting your submissions to BloggingZoom to your best stuff only, stuff that you’d really like to showcase to a broad audiance. Why? The whole idea of social bookmarking is to build a sustainable readership. So you should put your best foot forward, not filler articles. Just my opinion though.

One more thing, another huge difference between BloggingZoom and ‘Diggesque’ sites is no mainstream media allowed! That really gives us ‘little guys’ a fighting chance. I’m registered and ready to go, and very curious to see how successful this service is going to be. Check them out! And Zoom this article!

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

social bookmarking, blogging, generating traffic

A great article from Grizzly on the same topic!