Section 6.5. Consumer Electronics

6.5. Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics covers a lot of territory, from tiny handheld organizers to giant plasma televisions . Sites that review these products are usually organized by category. You pick your type of gadget (digital camera, wireless speakers ), manufacturer (Sony, Philips), and price range (under $300, say) to winnow through the selection. When you get to an individual product page, you see the full technical specifications and requirements.

Along with the site's professional opinion, you may also see comments from people who own and use the device you're considering. So if everyone says that shiny new photo printer's a dud, you can cross it off your list.

6.5.1. CNET

If it's got a circuit board, code, screen, woofer, tweeter, or buttons to push, the electronic media company CNET Networks has probably written about it (http://reviews.cnet.com). Products are reviewed by technical experts and rated on a scale of 1 to 10, but readers are encouraged to chime in with their own comments. The site has several gadget-themed blogs , discussion forums, short video reports , and buying guide pages to help you make shopping decisions. It also lists price ranges at various stores.

6.5.2. Dontbuyjunk

Dontbuyjunk (www.dontbuyjunk.com) fuses the results of consumer ratings and professional reviews of computers, cameras , and audio-video equipment. It sums up the overall consensus in a "TotalRank" rating for each device. As shown in Figure 6-3, you can narrow your product search by price or whatever attributes are most important to you. When you're shopping for a television, for example, you may value picture quality the mostor user -friendly controls.

Figure 6-3. The Dontbuyjunk site lets you compare products by price. Move the price slider on the left side of the page to instantly weed out products out of your budget. The site also lets you sort results according to other criteria, like how other people like the design or how easy the thing is to set up once you get it home.

6.5.3. Consumer Search

You can read reviews for just about every category of consumer electronics at Consumer Search (www.consumersearch.com). This ambitious site offers reports and rating for all sorts of other items as well, including tractors and teeth-whiteners. The site gathers product rankings from reviews it finds all over the Web.

6.5.4. Epinions

People who have an opinion on everything (you know the type) have found a home on the Web at www.epinions.com. Professional reviewers and regular consumers have put thousands of products and services under the Epinions microscope, and the sentiment is rarely lukewarm. It's up to you to decide. As well as providing a forum for picks and pans, Epinions maintains links to online stores that stock the items in question. Simply click to purchase if you're an efficient (or impulse) buyer.

WORD TO THE WISE
News for Nerds

In real life, there's no easy way to silence some idiot who's monopolizing a conversation, even if everyone else present is silently wishing he'd shut his pie hole. Online, though, it's another story.

Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) is an intense , freewheeling discussion site for uninhibited, sometimes over-the-top geeks , nerds, and programmers. It pioneered the use of using ratings to rank people. If you contribute a comment that's smart, concise , and interesting, the other members rank you highly; your "stock" goes up, and you gain more powers on the bulletin board. If everyone else consistently finds your postings to be off-point or self-important, your rankings sink, and fewer people read your comments.

Every Slashdotter therefore has an incentive to keep the discussion on point, andif you're into things like operating systems and programmingthis makes for some truly intriguing reading.

Digg (www.digg.com ) does something similar with technology reporting . It's a massive list of headlines from all over the Web, ranked by Digg readers in real time. The point, of course, is to save you time; the highest-ranked tech-news stories are, of course, the most interesting ones. They've been pre-screened for you by a staff of hundreds or thousands of strangers