Guide to the Health Care Debate

This is obviously a hasty job as are many Squidoo lenses but the makers might have something if they featured more of the nuts who show up at Town Hall meetings with guns and racist effigies of President Obama. You know the Republican extremists who claim Obama is not an American because he's black (he was born in the good ole U.S. of A while McCain was born in Panama and should not have even been allowed to run for President), the ones who think the Earth is flat and think there is no climate change and no overpopulation, tea droppers, tea parties, whatever the pundits call them.

Anyway I hate politics so I appreciate any attempt to make fun of the monsters in DC and in the provinces.

So visit the site, write something hateful in their guest book, and everybody will be happy.

http://www.squidoo.com/healthcaredebate

Valleywag

A good site to keep up with business news from Silicon Valley.

Since I am not a techie, I generally avoid sites like PCWorld, Wired and CNet. I use technology. I am less interested in the technology itself. I figure that if it is important, then sooner or later I will hear about it in the general media.

Oddly enough, this strategy often means that I hear about cutting edge stuff before the techies. Not always of course but enough to make me think that I am not crazy.

I am more interested in the money end of high tech anyway. I'd like to own the next Google rather than be one of millions of users. But that's another story and, if you're interested in that journey, I'll be blogging about it on another venue. This blog is supposed to be about websites.

Wouldn't it be a laugh if someday I reviewed my own software company's site and gave it a bad review? Don't put it past me. I'm as hard on my own projects as I am on other people's work.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/

Technorati

I'm not enough of a techie to review this site.

My initial interest was the gimmick of getting a little gizmo but I don't really like being stalked on the web. LiveJournal has something similar but no one reads my LiveJournal so I was carrying that baggage. [Consider that a review of LiveJournal]

http://www.livejournal.com/

If I want an avatar, I can go to SecondLife but I don't know if I want to ignore real people a few inches away from me in order to have an affair with a virtual person and risk divorce in real life. The real utility of SecondLife is virtual conferencing and there are other VR (virtual reality) and holographic/3D telephony sites.

I'll give Second Life the real review it deserves in a future article. So ignore any criticisms in this articles until I've had a second look at SecondLife (I have to work in puns, I have a quota to meet).

As for Technorati, if you are a techie go here --
http://technorati.com/

I generally avoid sites that require me to download anything. I spend half my times getting spyware, worms, virues, Trojans, adware, and such out of my computer. Google says everything is supposed to be in the cloud. You know, that vaporware Microsoft sells.

Steve Rubel's blog

I was two independent things.
1. trying to find alternatives to blogging and
2. looking for websites to review

At Top Ten Reasons To Give Up Blogging,
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_ten_reasons.php
I hit the Steve Rubel link and found a link I had been looking for and had not saved.

I'll be reviewing Lifestream after I have used it awhile.

As for Steve Rubel's blog, it helped me find another site worth reviewing so thumbs up.

Alexa

I went to Alexa to see how bad this blog is. Pretty bad. Not even in the top 100,000 for some reason. They (meaning experts on blogging) say that it takes a while to gain a readership and following.

The easy thing to do is bash Alexa. I won't because I figure that they are an honest service.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/http%3A%2F%2Fnetcompanies.blogspot.com

eBay

Another review of an established site (I promise I'll go back to the obscure sites soon).

I like eBay. I use them instead of Amazon because their vendors are fast, inexpensive, courteous (super-courteous, in fact, you can get into trouble if you don't take the time to give your thumbs up or down) and the merchandise is good.

I know, you're waiting for me to say something bad.

Well, they could probably increase their business tenfold if they had an interface that dummies could use. I'm computer literate enough that I can blog about tech, write a little html, yada yada yada. What I can't do is deal with auctions, PayPal, and shipping options. If you've seen all the "Dummies for Dummies" and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Idiocy" books out there, then you might be thinking that these books are way too long and are written for engineers. [Is this guy stupid or what?]

I have actually paid a little more for some products by having a friend or a bricks & mortar store merchant go to eBay for me so that I wouldn't have to. Somebody local could do a healthy business with people and for people who don't feel like doing this or that online. And isn't a lot of business based on laziness? Most of us don't raise chickens. We go to the supermarket for eggs and chicken meat. Most of us don't raise cows. We buy milk and beef at the store.

Anyway, this is not criticism of eBay. (More like criticism of PayPal) And a suggestion to anyone sharp enough to see a business opportunity and maybe do some market research.

Amazon

What would possess me to review a site that is not obscure? Doesn't matter what I say, it will get traffic.

Actually, this is more personal. Just a comment. Last time I used it they dictated my payment options.

I figure that if a vendor wants to sell me something and I want to buy and my method of payment is acceptable then what difference does it make?

A personal check in this case. Couldn't use it. So I went to their competitor. {Nevermind who, suffice to say that they have plenty}

You know the moral of the story.