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Actively Pointing People At Google Referrals
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Chaos Laboratory has a post up about how and why Google wants site publishers to actively promote the Google Referral ads. While it is against Google's Terms of Service (TOS) to promote the clicking of Adsense ads on the site (or to even draw attention to them with images or a "click here" pointer, this is completely different for Google Referrals.Although I can see how this would help the click-throughs of Google Referral ads on your site, I can't help but think that doing this and the other suggestion by Google of "devoting a write-up on the usefulness of the product" goes completely against the reason one should create a site or a blog. People want to read your thoughts and content...not play the game of trying to avoid the ads on your site or not knowing what are actually ads.This isn't the reason why I decided to remove Google Referrals from my site so if you use Google Referrals, you might find some useful info in the Chaos Laboratory post.
More About: Point , Inti

Highest And Lowest Radiation Cell Phones
2007-01-24 09:20:01
CNET has a list of the U.S. 10 highest and 10 lowest radiation cell phones. It's a pretty interesting list showing that if you have a Motorola cell phone (like me) you might want to exchange it. Maybe that's why there's an ache near my hip (where I keep my phone).Top 10 Highest Radiation Cell Phone s:Motorola V195Motorola Slvr L6Motorola V120cMotorola V265Motorola Slvr L2Motorola V70Motorola P8767Motorola ST7868Motorola ST7868WPalm Treo 650 GSMTop 10 Lowest Radiation Cell Phone s :Audiovox PPC66001Motorola MPx200Motorola Timeport L7089Qualcomm pdQ-1900T-Mobile SidekickSamsung SGH-S100Samsung SGH-S105Sony Ericsson Z600Mitsubishi G360Siemens S40
More About: Phones

Official Launch of ProductCritic.com!
2007-01-24 09:20:01
We've sent out the announcement to people who signed up on the site and have officially launched Prod uct Crit ic.com.Need an easy way to determine whether a specific Digital Camera, Camcorder, or Cell Phone is worth it? ProductCritic is a free site that gives you one location to find professional reviews of a particular product. The site also calculates a score of all the reviews and summarizes them to come up with the ProductCritic Score for each product.If you are currently evaluating a few brands or models and trying to make a decision about which Digital Camera, Camcorder, or Cell Phone to purchase, you will immediately benefit from ProductCritic. You only need to compare the ProductCritic Scores to get a good idea if professional reviewers generally rate one product better than another.Finally, all the expert reviews of a product are linked from the site so you no longer need to go searching the Internet for all the reviews. You'll be confident that you haven't missed any revi...
More About: Launch , Official

Sneaky Camera Marketing Tactics
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com) is one of the most trusted camera information and review sites on the Internet (to me, they share the top spots with Steve's Digicams and Digital Camera Resource Page). They have a short post up titled "Stop misleading 'Image Stabilization' labels".The post describes the tactics some companies take in labeling their cameras as having a "Image Stabilization" or "Anti-shake" feature when in fact, there is no actual physical anti-shake mechanism. Instead, these cameras perform their "image stabilization" by turning up the ISO for some shots. This allows you to take pictures in low-light and therefore, reduce the blurriness but the quality of the image goes way down.I always wondered about this. I have a Canon 20D with an actual Image Stabilization lens and there are still many instances where it's hard to take a non-flash picture without the blur. The dpreview.com post backs up my suspicions when I see commercials where people are bounc...
More About: Marketing , Market , Tactics , Mark

Uh Oh! Canon Issues Safety Notice for Powershot A530/A540's
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Canon USA has issued a safety notice about Power shot A530 and A540's overheating. Here is a portion of the notice:"We have discovered that, in a very small number of Powershot A530 and Powershot A540 digital cameras, the area around the battery cover on the bottom of the camera may become hot. We would like to convey the details of this phenomenon and our service policy."Please read the full Canon Safety Notice for more information.I really like the Canon digital cameras and routinely recommend them (especially the A540) to friends. I hope this is a small issue and doesn't affect any future recommendations. I wonder if anybody has actually been burnt by the overheating area.
More About: Canon , Issues , Cano

ProductCritic Comparisons With PC World's Top 10 Cameras
2007-01-24 09:20:01
In a previous post, I pointed out PC World 's 2006 list of Top 10 Point & Shoot Camera s. Product Critic has been updated to include all these cameras so I thought it would be appropriate to provide a comparison of the PC World ratings with the ProductCritic scores for those same cameras to demonstrate the difference that aggregate ratings can provide.PC World's Top 10 ListHP Photosmart R727 - 82 (ProductCritic Score = 73)Canon Powershot A540 - 81 (ProductCritic Score = 79)Casio Exilim EX-Z600 - 80 (ProductCritic Score = 80)Fujifilm Finepix F30 - 79 (ProductCritic Score = 85)Canon Powershot SD630 - 79 (ProductCritic Score = 79)Fujifilm Finepix E900 - 78 (ProductCritic Score = 84)HP Photosmart R927 - 78 (ProductCritic Score = 72)Nikon Coolpix S6 - 77 (ProductCritic Score = 75)Kodak EasyShare C743 - 77 (ProductCritic Score = 63)HP Photosmart R967 - 76 (ProductCritic Score = 79)So, with the same cameras, ranked according to ProductCritic Score gives this list (along with their ProductCr...
More About: Comp

I'm Already A Stats Addict
2007-01-24 09:20:01
As part of starting up a new site, you need to get all your metrics in place early. ProductCritic currently uses stats gathering tools:Google AnalyticsGoogle AdsenseGoogle Webmaster ToolsEven though the site hasn't officially launched, I'm still checking the metrics quite regularly to see the affects that the implementation of various strategies or link sites have on visits. Since we haven't really even officially launched to friends and family, we can tell that most of the current visits to both ProductCritic and this blog are either from people stumbling onto the sites or are our own clicks.Besides ensuring that we are being spidered from the big search engines and all posts on this blog are being pinged by Weblogs or Technorati, I saw a new site called Tag A Cloud that allows you to create a tag for your site and some keywords as a link to your site. Almost immediately, I saw referring links from Tag A Cloud. For interests sake, the tag I added to that site for ProductCritic i...
More About: Read , Stats , Stat , Ready , Addict

Help! I Bought A Camcorder And Suck At Shooting Movies!
2007-01-24 09:20:01
I must admit that my camcorder skills are kindergarten poor. My still shots with my dSLR camera are quite a bit better than they used to be after I learned some key tips such as The Rule of Thirds but I haven't learned the same level of tips for camcorders.PC World has put up a short list of 5 tips in an article entitled "Making Movie s : Tips for New Camcorder Owners". Even though I've owned a camcorder for a couple years, following some of these tips would have certainly helped me.If you received a new camcorder for Christmas, I'd suggest investing one day going online and learning some key tips. It'll pay off hugely in the quality and watchability of your home movies.
More About: Shooting , Suck

Most Important Search Optimization Technique - Page Titles
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Since ProductCritic is the first site that Gerry and I have worked together on, I learned a lot along the way. One of the most important topics (aside from content and database schema and the look of the site via CSS) is that once we launched the site, how would people find it?Naturally, we're hoping that this blog will help with that (then again, how will most people find this blog?) but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge part in people finding the site.While there are a lot of topics when it comes to SEO, we decided to target the easiest and most natural strategies. At the top of the list is ensuring that every page on your site has a proper title (what is displayed at the top of the browser window).If you go through ProductCritic, you will notice that every page has a unique title that is very specific to the content on that page. If you go to Digital Cameras, the title is "Digital Camera Reviews - ProductCritic". If you go to a specific product, like the Nikon D80 (...
More About: Tech , Page , Technique , Port

Flickr's Most Popular Cameras And Their ProductCritic Scores
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Flickr has posted a Camera Finder page that charts the most popular cameras used by people to take photos that are posted to their site.The graphs are quite interesting and shows the Canon Digital Rebel XT to be way ahead of the other Digital SLR cameras. Also, quite amazing is that all of the Top 5 Point & Shoot cameras being used are all of the Canon brand. They are obviously doing a great job on the marketing side and delivering on the product quality side.As for me, I have a Canon 20D and I love it! For the level of my photography skills, the camera and lens make all the difference in my photos. I don't think I'm much better as a photographer but the camera sure makes up for my shortcomings. For my Point & Shoot camera for keeping with me in my pocket, I have a Canon SD500.I've provided Flickr's list below along with the scores for the cameras that have Product Critic scores. Some of the cameras are no longer sold by the manufacturers so there may not be review summaries ...
More About: Pop , Popular , Flickr

Organically Grown Website - Is it Possible?
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Before we officially launch ProductCritic, I'm going to see how many people can stumble upon the site without us linking it from anywhere. Besides putting up a tag on TagACloud, I haven't placed a link to ProductCritic anywhere else on the web.Today though, I noticed two things. First, a spike up in traffic to the site (which I've only told some friends and family about). Looking at the referrals, I noticed that the visits came from a blog called Web 2.0 Magazine. After digging around a bit, I noticed that in a blog entry talking about Web 2.0 sites, a comment had been put up with a link to ProductCritic. That's where all the links came from!The second interesting thing I noted related to organic growth of the site is that I did a search on del.icio.us and someone had added a bookmark to ProductCritic already! As of this writing, 14 people have saved the url to their bookmarks. I would have thought that most of the 14 people came from the above blog referral but actually the Pro...
More About: Website , Site , Webs , Organic , Call

CNET's Top 6 Cell Phones of 2006
2007-01-24 09:20:01
CNET has listed their Top 6 Cell Phone s of 2006. Listed below are the phones, CNET's score and the associated ProductCritic score:Sony Ericsson K790a - 8.3 (ProductCritic Score = 86)LG CU500 - 8.3 (ProductCritic Score = 76)Nokia 5300 XPress - 8.3 (ProductCritic Score = 82)Sony Ericsson W810i - 8.0 (ProductCritic Score = 87)LG VX8300 - 8.0 (ProductCritic Score = 83)Motorola i850 - 7.3 (ProductCritic Score = 77)From all the reviews I've read, the best phone is actually the Sony Ericsson W810i (and it would definitely in the running to be my next phone). I think the only real discrepency between CNET and the rest of the reviewers on the net is with the LG CU500 which CNET really likes and which only has an OK ProductCritic Score.It also must have been a pretty slow year for cell phones for CNET to list a phone with a rating of 7.3 one of their year's best.
More About: Cell Phones , Cell Phone , Phones

HappyCodr - A Showcase Opportunity for ProductCritic
2007-01-24 09:20:01
HappyCodr is a site that aims to be the main showcase for sites designed with Ruby on Rails. The guys at Start Us Up! have done a great job in providing a place for Rails developers to promote their hard work.We're excited to have an opportunity to promote Product Critic to the rest of the development community. HappyCodr's list of submitted sites is also a great place to see all the great work that other developers are doing.
More About: Show , Port , Opportunity , Happy

The Best Canon Digital SLR Tutorial Ever!
2007-01-24 09:20:01
Like I've mentioned before, although I take much better pictures than I ever did with my Cano n 20D (much thanks to the camera and the lens), I could still use a lot of help with composition and the camera settings. I find that I never have the time to take a whole weekend and just take photos and learn from my mistakes.PhotoshopSupport.com has the best tutorial I've ever read on using a Digital SLR and it's even better that it's focused on Canon cameras. Given that I'm on the computer all the time, maybe I'll be able to pick up a few tips.
More About: Tutorial , Best , Ever

Starting Out Like ProductCritic? Read John Chow!
2007-01-24 09:20:01
While there are quite a few blogs that I read to learn as much as I can about SEO and what works for an internet site now, one of my favorites is John Chow dot Com. Recently, he offered readers the chance to get a free linkback if you reviewed his blog. Although this isn't technically a "paid post", I am hoping that John adds this review to his list and we get a linkback from his blog which ranks high on Technorati (#1341). This helps raise the Google and Technorati rank of Product CriticBlog and will hopefully lead to more readers (which will hopefully drive traffic to our main site).Who Is This John Chow Guy?You can read about him on his blog but I know that he lives in Vancouver (like me) so maybe at some point we'll get a chance to meet as he does seem like a genuinely nice guy. Also like me, his "real" job is not running his blog but running The TechZone which is a very popular hardware news site (over 200K page views per day) that he started in 1999.What's Good?I've been re...
More About: Read , Start , Star

CES 2007: Should You Listen To CNET's Hype?
2007-01-24 09:20:01
CES 2007, the largest consumer electronics tradeshow in the world, is taking place right now in Las Vegas. Each year, CNET does extensive coverage of the products they see at the show. This year is no different with their coverage of CES 2007.Since most of the products covered are not yet available for purchase, I thought it'd be interesting to look back at CES 2006 and see what CNET chose as their "CES Best in Show" for last year and what the ProductCritic Scores are for some of those products.In their Cameras and Camcorders category, they chose the Sanyo Xacti HD1 which gets a ProductCritic Score of 61.In their Cell Phone category, they chose the Samsung ZX20 which fares better with a ProductCritic Score of 72.What's the moral of this post? Don't get caught in the hype of all the reports coming out of CES. What looks like a "Best in Show" during the show may actually be a dud when the product actually gets released and people get a longer time to review!
More About: List , Listen , Hype , Should