Archive for December 2005

Hollywood starts buzzing its movies long before they come out. You see a movie in the fall and its previews show movies coming out in the following summer. Book Publishers are starting to adopt the same approach. One author’s book has received mentions in magazines and blogs. Many authors send their books to reviewers at least a month before the official release. I’ve seen this firsthand as I’ve got a couple of books I’ve just finished and they’re not due out till January.

If I had a book, I’d do the same… contact bloggers, book reviewers and media that cover the same topic or industry as the book.

It’s also okay to find reviewers long after the book comes out even over a year later. I’ve reviewed many books over a year old. Not all books are outdated as quickly as software — heck, some are never outdated. [ Link Tara ]

Commercial Break…

Imagine a job in which you set your own hours, and live wherever you
please: at the beach, in the mountains, in an apartment in Paris,
London, or Berlin. As a copywriter, you can.

Back to your scheduled programming…

With all the price comparison sites available, I’m posting them all in one post because it’s just tough to keep up and remember them all. The first three places I go whenever I shop are Froogle, Pricegrabber, and ISBN.nu.

I don’t just buy from the place offering the best price. It also depends on the business’ reputation. If no ratings are available for the business, then I search elsewhere like the Better Business Bureau and BizRate. Offertrax lets you store, compare and receive price alerts.

Pronto is a Firefox shopping comparison plugin.

Another thing to consider is the best time of the year to shop for certain items. MSN Money lists the best times of the year for the following. Also, some of these have special notes.

• Air conditioners: winter
• Airline tickets: Varies
• Appliances: Ask stores about warehouses of returns and floor models in mint condition.
• Big appliances: September and October
• Bicycles and outdoor gear: January
• Boats: January, February and March
• Cars: September
• Cell phones: any time
• Computers: July and August
• Cookware: April and May; October and November
• Flooring: Wholesalers offer “buy direct” prices online to public for over 1,000 square feet.
• Furniture: January and July. Also find out if the store has an outlet or website that sells floor samples, discontinued styles or returned merchandise with deep discounts.
• Gas grills: winter
• Jewelry: Avoid the holidays, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day
• Linens and bedding: January
• Mattresses: year-round
• Real estate: spring
• Recreational vehicles: fall and winter
• Rugs: Department stores markup rugs big time so stick with wholesalers.
• Toys: October and November
• TVs and home theaters: winter holiday sales and January
• Vacuum cleaners: April and May
• Wedding: winter

Most Often Used

Froogle results look like typical search engine results. It also explores sites that often don’t appear in the comparison shopping site lists. I’ve found some great deals here.

Pricegrabber is the one I go to the most outside of Froogle. I think its comparison chart is the easiest to read and scan.

PriceScan is similar to Pricegrabber and easier to read than the ones listed further down.

ISBN.nu.

Books

AddAll does books, music, movie, and magazine.

Best Book Buys also compares book prices as well as music, videos, electronics, and bikes.

BooksPrice searches for lowest price on new and used books, CDs and DVDs. Also includes a feature for finding the best price when buying more than one book since shipping costs could be lower due to the combined order.

FetchBook

ISBN.nu does only price comparisons for books. While I find better deals through Amazon Marketplace or elsewhere, this is a great starting point.

Local Stores

8coupons: Coupons in your zip code.

SalesHound.com

ShopLocal

General Price Comparison Sites

The following sites are similar in how they produce their results and they don’t have a neat chart like Pricegrabber or MySimon. Their results are similar to Froogle, but I think Froogle provides better results. I recommend using a few sites when looking for a specific item as every site links to different stores.

CostHelper reports what people are paying.

DealTime

MySimon is one of the first price comparison sites I’ve used. Its site doesn’t look good in Firefox.

PriceComparison

SearchAllDeals searches all deals and coupon sites in one shot.

Shopzilla

SortPrice

Yahoo! Shopping

Coupons and Discounts

Most of these sites are junky or have a ton of popups, but I’ve found coupons here.

BigSavings

CoolSavings requires free registration.

CouponHaven

CouponSaver

CouponSurfer

CouponTweet: Coupon codes from twitter.

Current Codes

eCoupons

eDealFinder

FatWallet

Free Shipping

KeyCode Coupons

NaughtyCodes

Rather-Be-Shopping.com

RetailMeNot

ShipGooder: Compare shipping rates.

SmartSource – grocery coupons

Online Deals

These sites list bargains and big sale items. The best place is Woot, but it only shows one item per day. Once in a while, it’ll post a new item as soon as one sells out for a certain amount of time (usually 24-hours).

Alice: This is a little different. What you do is enter the products you normally buy. “For each product you add, you’ll get automatic coupons, reminders when you’re running low, and easy re-ordering tools so you never run out again.”

DealHunting

Deal of Day

Dealsea: Short-term deep discounts.

Hot Deals Club

ShopStyle: Enter your favorite brands and the site emails you when there’s a sale.

SlickDeals.net

ugenie provides discounts on bundled items.

Discounted Shopping Stores

American Science & Surplus – science bargains

Cheap Tickets – travel

Dawdle: Buy and sell new and used games

Deep Discount DVD for DVDs.

Expedia Travel – travel

Farecompare – travel

Farecast – travel

Free CD Software

Kayak – travel

Lowestfare.com – Travel

Overstock

Priceline – travel

SmartBargains

Updated: September 26, 2010

Top 10 lists! Get your top 10 lists here! Memorable Marketing Turkeys from CMO makes you thankful you don’t come up with such ideas, right? Not you. Never. [ Link Cincom ]

Publicity Hound points the way to the top ten PR blunders.

The year in media errors and corrections. This site is a great find as it reports on corrections, errors, and retractions. [ Link: Neat New Stuff I Found This Week ]

Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster Online have published their words of the year for 2005. Dictionary.com focuses on the most looked-up words for every letter of the alphabet. Obviously, this is 26 words. However, there could be a B word that appears more often than another word in this list. But it’s nice to see every letter get recognition as some unlucky letters like Q and Z rarely make such lists.

Merriam-Webster lists the top ten of the most looked-up words.

Lake Superior State University went a different route and lists the most banished words. Making the list: red state / blue state, carbs, blogs, and “You’re fired!” Good list as I agree some of these words have been overkill.

You probably heard by now as it was a frequently linked entry as the news hit. New Oxford American Dictionary pronounced podcast as the word of the year. Other words included bird flue, ICE, sudoku (w00t!), and trans fat. The dictionary is already collecting words for 2006. Send your nominations to dictionaries@oup.com.

El word de sponsor…

Imagine a job in which you set your own hours, and live wherever you
please: at the beach, in the mountains, in an apartment in Paris,
London, or Berlin. As a copywriter, you can.

No one can predict how things turn out. Big wig execs like to make a strong statement, but sometimes they’re far off base… as the Foot in Mouth Awards show.

Top 9 Best and Worst Lists of 2005 from About Freelance Writing

Thanks to the Internet and POD (print on demand) publishing, traditional (or deadwood) publishers are looking for ways to stay alive. The Dallas Morning News has come a long way in mixing the Internet and technology with its newspaper. It has established blogs, references “for more info go to www.xxx.xxx” in its newspaper, and more.

HarperCollins plans to publish digital copies of its books while storing and managing its digital files. I believe this means that the company plans to use search engines to help people find the digital books, but they can only download them from HarperCollins rather than elsewhere.

First thing that came to my mind is how does Amazon play in this? Will HarperCollins allow Amazon to sell its digital books? Amazon already has digital versions of some of the company’s books. HarperCollins and Amazon are in negotiations as the article reports.

I know that seeing ads everywhere in a blog annoys and I’m guilty of it. I do the best I can to provide you with information that you can use or find valuable. Many quality Web sites are using ads and I respect that. I even click on them when I find something interesting.

The ads are there for the most obvious reason. Since becoming a full-time content maven, I’ve had to explore various routes to support the family and that includes ads. This may not matter to you, but I simply want to be up front with you about this.

Ads come with the risk of losing readers. Master New Media, Engadget, Gizmodo (ooh, I listed competitors next to each other), and Boing Boing are well-respected and full of traffic, right?
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It looks like reporting on the “war against Christmas” is a hot topic. Unfortunately, in an attempt to join the fray by reporting so-called new information, one show has resorted to false reporting. On Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, with Bill O’Reilly and guest Jim Pinkerton, Fox 4 News analyst, the show had a segment entitled “More Victories for Christmas” on Friday, December 9. The show’s Web site quotes (so you know I’m not making this up and I took a screen shot for measure):

In Plano, Texas, a school told students they couldn’t wear red and green because they are Christmas colors. That’s flat-out fascism. If I were a student in Plano, I’d be a walking Christmas tree after that order.

False, false, false! Another Dan Rather blunder. When I picked up my daughter from a Plano ISD school last Friday, many kids were wearing Santa hats. If this statement were true, they would’ve never been able to leave the school wearing them. Furthermore, the first graders at my son’s school are building gingerbread houses, a tradition associated with Christmas. Plano ISD superintendent, Doug Otto issued a statement:

The school district does not restrict students or staff from wearing certain color clothes during holiday times or any other school days.

While controversy is a good way to attract attention, false information leads to bad PR for FOX while the city and people of Plano have been slandered. Has The O’Reilly Factor decided to join the bottom feeders and switch to tabloid reporting? It appears so.

A professor I work with at NYU asked me about i.e., etc., and e.g. and when to use which. First, to make it easier to remember which one means what, here’s what they mean:

i.e. – that is (stands for id est from Latin). You can also use it to substitute, “in other words.”

etc. – and so on, and the rest (abbreviation for etcetera).

e.g. – for instance, for example (abbreviation for exempli gratia in Latin). Remember e.g. by thinking of it as “example given” and then follow it with a few examples. e.g. apples, oranges, bananas.
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If you think you’re having a bad weekend… consider a couple of thousand people who have to face L-day as in layoff on the 15th. Not surprisingly, Adobe plans to cut jobs and announce them on December 15. Wonderful holiday present… (yes, sarcastic). The cuts aren’t limited to former Macromedia staff. Most cuts will occur where there’s duplication and some will get offered relocation packages. [ Link Beedigital ]

Got an email from a colleague asking about Fireworks. I think the application will stick around as it’s not a competitor of Photoshop or Illustrator. It’s a unique application that’s specifically for Web-based graphics. But I could be wrong. I hope not as I think the program has value that’s not found in others.

Plano Independent School District decided to close the schools yesterday because of an ice freeze. But a couple of other school districts delayed their opening by two hours. Plano should’ve done the same as the sun was out by 8:00 am.

With all the kids home, I couldn’t concentrate on work. So what did I do? Surfed 400 random blogs at BlogExplosion. Why? I discovered some great blogs and learned a few things along the way. I’ll share the lessons next week. Yeah, I can earn points as I surf the blogs, but that’s not why I did it though it was a nice bonus.

Been adding a lot of valuable resources I’ve found this week to the resources.

More 2005 gift ideas added.

Sudoku has a few new ones plus a new game that I ain’t getting into. I have enough problems being addicted to the puzzle.

Writer and Writing Resources

Book resources are here.

If you have items for any of these lists, drop me a line.

In November’s issue of meryl.net newsletter, I included “Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn” (I don’t remember where I got it from, otherwise I’d happily add an attribution). Weatherly wrote a Haiku-like thang (obviously it’s not a Haiku since it doesn’t use 5-7-5) a few years ago, sent it to me, and gave me permission to print it here.

thought
rough bough
through though

Clever, eh? My attempt at creating a Haiku with more reasons why English is hard.

Polish Polish shoes
Two cans is too much to use
Pare down for the pair.