With the upcoming election I feel like all I see are negative campaigns, although I have to say the majority of them are from Apple against Microsoft.  Seems like Apple can’t say any thing nice about their own products and only negative things about Microsoft (like their commercial about MS spending advertising money.  hmm, who has more commercials, more billboards, more magazine ads?)

Apple commercials should really just tout their advantages instead of saying what’s wrong with others, I don’t see these commercials being helpful for their image; maybe I’m wrong since I’m not part of the Mac Cult.  They should tout their single mouse button, or the number of configuration changes that require you to run them in terminal, the great advantage of PowerPC apps that run simualted on an Intel and slow down the machine.  Apples really are simple to use if you don’t want to do anything complicated.

I’m not trying to be mean about Apple, I’m just not blinded by anything they do.  Nor am I blinded by Microsoft either.  I prefer the iPod to most other MP3 players, I prefer Windows Media Player 11 to iTunes, I prefer the fact that OS X has the Darwin core based on unix, and runs native GNU applications via Terminal, but I really don’t like Apple commercials.

Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare online anti-virus  is a very effective small footprint app.  I’ve used it without much need as I am very careful with my PCs, but I recommended it to a friend that had a rather vicious virus that all the other free anti-virus apps completely ignored and it found 9 viruses and saved her poor little machine.

If you ever publish your URL in print anywhere, anyplace that you can’t click from, you need to make your URL rememberable and easy to read without confusion.  Using CamelCase will improve readability and allow users to recall the URL with ease.  You also should make sure that when your URL is in the address bar it isn’t misinterpreted in a bad way.

Microsoft launched a new campaign recently and chose a poor URL: imapc.lifewithoutwalls.com looks a little like iMac.lifewithoutwalls.com if you read it kind of quick.

In Time magazine I saw an ad for a show on TLC and the URL was realsimplereallife.com which is difficult to read. It should have been printed as RealSimpleRealLife.com to reinforce the name of the show and improve recall.

All the new Web 2.0 “style” websites are also making chances of people remembering their websites more difficult by choosing waky bizzarly spelled URLs.  Can you remmeber the spellings?  Can you tell what the heck they do?

mologogo.com Mo’ Logo, Go?
frappr.com Frappé?
wufoo.com Wu Foo Bar?
cocomment.com Coco Ments?

Think before you buy that next great URL.

Have you ever lost a window, something that can happen when you switch often between using a windows laptop on it’s own and with an extra monitor.  Or if you somehow manage to drag the window off screen and get it back. Pistachio to the rescue from the land of the rising sun.  This great little program sits in your tray and allows you to find a window and relocate it to any location on screen.  It also boasts a number of other great features.

• You can control the sound volume from the mouse wheel.
• Lock your mouse and keyboard while cleaning them, useful if you at your desk while at work.
• Force a window to always be on top.
• Snap windows to each other or the screen edge when resizing or moving, perfect for the seriously anal amongst us.

Nero is bringing TiVo (officially) to your PC.

Ever go to a store such as Amazon and search for something and try to find the best rated product? I find that the rating sorting doesn’t accurately display products by consumer approval. Just having a high product rating shouldn’t list a product first when sorting by rating, especially if the product has 5 out of 5 stars rated by only one user.  And it seems that if only 1 of 3 people even thought it was a decent review that those 5 stars are not as reliable as they you would want them to be.  Sure you can blame the people who write them and then rate every review yourself, and then sort the reviews for each product by the most helpful reviews, but that’s a lot of work.  I feel that a more automated system that would add weights to each star rating and incorporate that weight to the total number of reviews and number of helpful reviews as well could acheive a formula that would allow for a more relevant list of products ordered by a logical rating that takes into account the quality of the review.

I played with a few formulas before I arrived at this one, which I will state isn’t perfect, but you can get the idea.  And of course what you use as the weight of the ratings and how you apply the helpfulness will affect how many points are finally added to each product.

POINTS = v * s + (y-n) * s
v: number of reviews
s: curved scale value for rating based on  5=25, 4=10, 3=1, 2=0.01, 1=0.005
y: number of helpful review votes across all reviews
n: number of un-helpful review votes across all reviews

I did a search for “802.11n router” on Amazon and found the top six products ordered by user rating had a 5 star product with 1 review listed first.  After my system this is how those top six should be listed

Amazon Rank	My Rank	Rating	Reviews	Helpful Votes	Total Votes	My Points
5.	1.	4.0	344	1232	1663	11450
6.	2.	4.0	119	567	793	4600
2.	3.	4.5	12	34	41	780
3.	4.	4.5	3	11		240
4.	5.	4.0	4	0	0	40
1.	6.	5.0	1	1	3	0

Of course items that are older will have more reviews, but at the same time these items will also have reviews that will be rated by others that will properly let you know if something is truly rated high, not just the highest rated. Other possibilites are to make the formula more specific by multiplying the helpful scores by the rate they are marked for and not simply adding all the thumbs ups and thumbs down collectively as I have.

Other considerations could even be taken involving the person that gave the rating. These could be extra points given to a rating by a person that has had a certain level of helpful reviews on other products, by this that could mean that a person that gives a 3 rating to a review would then possibly count as multiple 3s based on his level. In this example if “Bobby M.” reviewed 20 products all of which have received more than 100 helpful reviews with a 90% helpful rating then his vote could be counted as 5 votes instead of one as he is considered an “expert.”

I think this is a good start into creating a more helpful way to present product ratings especially in a world were sorting and finding the perfect product is very difficult as more and more products flood the market.