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I wish winter was over and summer was here. It’s easier to dress up and be fashionable when you’re not covered up in a bubble coat and snow boots.
I was tipped off about the site Futuregirls.net, which offers Beauty and Fashion Hints and Tips. At first glance, it makes recommendations of products related to makeup, hair, clothing, shoes, bags, jewelry, and strangely enough, electronics as well. I would have thought that these electronics would be related in someway to beauty and fashion. However, while cameras can be considered essential in the pursuit of beauty, I’m not so sure about the GPS and the HDMI cables. Perhaps a little more streamlining is in order.
The establishing webpage also needs a little more color and images to jazz it up, as well as a copyeditor to catch those grammatical errors that never fail to irritate me. “Jewery”? Really? In large font, at that.
When I clicked on the link to Futuregirls’ makeup page, there were only seven products being advertised, and no text to guide both those experienced and new to makeup as to what these products are for, what skin tone they would be best suited for, and which products they should be used with. A few tips on blending these products with others would have been ideal.
The link to the Futuregirls’ hair page also needed improvement. I wasn’t even sure if the products on the page were hair care products, beauty books, or biographies.
Finally, Futuregirls.net needs to work on its product presentation. Uggs are not the best way to lure me into an afternoon of shoe shopping, yet they were the first results when I went to click on the Shoes link. Bring out the pretty shoes first.
I tried clicking on the Shopping Cart link and I ended up in the Amazon webpage, which left me thinking, why do I need to go through Futuregirls.net when I can simply shop via Amazon? Futuregirls.net needs to give me additional value for my clicks: it has to give me content by way of product reviews, sale prices, and actual beauty and fashion tips before I consider using this website.
Ecommerce For Everyone allows people to sell Amazon.com products on their website. It’s similar to what the Amazon affiliates program offers, except that instead of signing up as an Amazon affiliate directly, Ecommerce For Everyone has three three at-cost packages to set it up for you: E-Commerce Lite for $9.99/mo; E-Commerce Pro for $19.99/mo; and E-Commerce Platinum for $29.99/mo. Discounts are available for those who get the bi-annual or annual plans.
The site features a demo video that better explains how the system works.
Three good things about it:
- the website has a forum where users can interact with other users and discuss site promotion, ask for solutions or critiques, or air concerns;
- it also provides online and toll-free (386-8682061) tech support;
- nothing to download or install.
You can sign up for an Ecommerce for Everyone package, or you can sign up for the Amazon Affiliates program. I guess your decision depends on your comfort level with the net.
It was 1991, my friend Jojo just turned 32 and discovered the internets for the first time. Specifically, Match.com We were necessarily skeptical but he met Ruud, who didn’t turn out to be a bogeyman. After a few real time dates, they ended up with two puppies and a hybrid car. Hurrah, internets.
That was in 1991. Nearly 20 years later, the internets became slightly freakier.
I can’t imagine how Jojo would even begin his search for true love today. Facebook, Multiply, blogs — everything is so out there and everyone is connected. Of course, friending someone who is a friend of a friend is infinitely safer than chatting up a total stranger, but I remember how Jojo literally found the strength to reach out because of his relative anonymity. The internets freed him from the bounds of friendship and his old self and left him able to reinvent and rediscover himself.
He had agonized over the then new issue of anonymity v. trust v. personal safety. He wanted to establish a connection with his new faceless stranger friends but he was aware that if he was being coy, then the other person could be concealing so much more. Oh, the juggling act of privacy and friending.
Fast forward to 2008 and we discover Crush or Flush. Chatting through text or YM, without the other person having to find out where you are. It’s another social networking site that lets people discover other people through their interests and social demographics. If you like someone, you Crush them. If they like you back, they Crush you and you end up with a Mutual Crush. (Awww, high school prom, anyone?)
The important difference is that Crush or Flush comes with its own “telephone operator” to block unwanted messages. If you want to drop someone, you Flush them, and they will never know that they got flushed because they don’t have your real digits. As the site promises:
If someone harasses you or causes a problem, we will block his number and that person will permanently disappear. No one every gets your e-mail address, real name, or cell phone number – they always remain private.
I guess people can always agree to be more open and truthful as the relationship develops but at least it’s a safeguard against freaky people who reveal their icky quirks too early. Me, I’m a believer in facetime and long relationships where you goad the other person into showing their worst, but yes, sometimes, even I wish for an intermediary to tell the other person, No.
There’s a new site that purports “to find the best blog post of each day” which I discovered through Mturk. It calls itself Yearblook, an unfortunate name which brings to mind words like “sludge” and “slime” and “icky things that you better not step on, otherwise you’ll find yourself dragged down to the bottom.”
It’s another one of those vote-driven sites where readers can vote on submitted posts. No registration required, so I don’t know how they will handle the multiple clicks generated by a user on a proxy server. (Well, they probably got that covered. I tried voting twice on a post just to see if I can and the site wouldn’t let me. Besides, according to their site, they use a “secret algorithm.” )
Still, Yearblook seems a lot like Digg, the difference being that it intends to publish the collection after a year.
To which I am necessarily skeptical. Publication works for PostSecret because it’s very visual and not all postcards are housed on the site. The book is often the only record and it makes for a good coffee table book.
But the best and most revealing personal blog posts are those that are usually flocked and they are flocked for a reason: because the blogger wants to share only with a limited few.
On the other hand, if it isn’t a personal post, then it’s probably available on the internets somewhere. I already keep track of the blogs I want to read, and the posts I want to remember using delicious and Google reader and other blog aggregators. Do I necessarily want a capsule of last year to take up precious space on my limited shelves? Meh. Last year is already on the internets. I can just pull down the site or its cached file without having to get my hands dusty.
Besides, think of the trees that will have to give up their lives for this project. Is it worth killing them for this?
I do miss some lost posts though. The old snarky Television Without Pity (TWOP) reviews, for one thing, before they went all corporate and lost their bite. But I find that my daily reading is too full now to lost sleep over lost posts. There’s always something new up at Gawker and it’s not like I’ve gone through all of Slate yet. Which brings us to another issue: your blogosphere may vary. Your best posts may not be my best posts.
So my prediction for Yearblook: they will end up like my high school yearbook. People posed for studio shots but the kids in charge of putting the yearbook together graduated or moved on or lost in touch with each other or stained the photos with ink and the yearbook just never got published. But that’s okay because we had already moved on.
All this talk about the economy is stressing me out and making me think second thoughts about going to New York. This vacation is going to be a major expense and will use up all of my savings. It’s a good thing I have a job but it might be a good idea to scare up another source of income. Living in a small community doesn’t make it easy, but I’m glad the internet offers certain opportunities without having to leave the house. With a full-time job, I can’t afford to take on something that will require me to physically report to another office. I just need something that I can do during my spare time.
I toddled off to TechieCrossing today to look for part-time tech jobs. It’s easy enough to search for job opportunities by state. I bookmarked some openings using the Add to My Hotlist option onsite. I also tried looking for jobs by field using the advanced search function. I was surprised that the drop down search function offered to search for jobs for me in non-tech related fields, such as Law and Blue Collar but apparently, clicking on these options will lead me to other Crossing sites that specialize in that particular field. Very very interesting. And convenient.
I haven’t finished my search yet. The site promises 138,222 openings at the moment, with 18,014 new jobs posted in the past 7 days alone. Wish me luck.
WritersWeekly, a site I frequent for leads on writing markets, is sounding the alarm against an Amazon business decision that will prove detrimental to small printing houses.
In an article, Angela Hoy of WritersWeekly talks about how Amazon is now requiring print on demand (POD) publishers to use Amazon subsidiary BookSurge to print their book orders or else “the ‘buy’ button on their Amazon.com book pages will be ‘turned off.’”
The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon’s Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted “free shipping” that Amazon offers.
There have already been complaints about the quality of the products produced by BookSurge, as documented in that site.
Of course, having a major retailer dictate the terms of the sales carried on its website in such a monopolistic manner is that Amazon will always have the final say on pricing, distribution and access to services. PODs have a very small market as it is; how can they hope to negotiate for better rates against a behemoth like Amazon?
My other fear is that this will result in the homogenization of tastes. Amazon is already heavily promoting pap bestsellers and self-help books. Why should it exert additional effort in printing one or two copies of an obscure text that will only have a handful of readers?
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