Don't Let Scammers Hijack Your Site

In a previous post, I talked about getting rid of MFA sites. I just dislike the thought of a visitor to ProductCritic wanting to read digital camera reviews and clicking on an ad they think they want more information about only to reach a "made for adsense" site that just leeches clicks from ProductCritic visitors who are looking for genuinely helpful information.

But, blocking MFA sites isn't enough. In the niche that ProductCritic sits in, many of the adsense ads shown are from sites selling cameras and camera supplies. Unfortunately, there are quite a few instances of these camera stores running scams of various sorts. Some of these scams (and how to avoid them) are described very well by Photo.net and Bob Atkins.

I don't like the idea of some scam store using ProductCritic as a vehicle for scamming innocent visitors to our site. So, while it takes some extra effort, I pay attention to the ads that are being displayed on ProductCritic and, in addition to looking for MFA sites, when I see an ad for a store, I look it up on ResellerRatings. If it has a bad score and has a lot of negative comments, I add that site to our Adsense "Competitive Ad Filter" list so that the scam store's ad never shows up on ProductCritic again.

I hate the thought of these scammers hijacking the visitors of ProductCritic and someone potentially getting ripped off because of a visit to ProductCritic. This blog states it correctly...it's about reputation and brand. It takes extra effort to be this diligent but it's the right thing to do.

Get More Complete Web Analysis With Performancing

We use Google Analytics to get stats on visitors and pageviews for ProductCritic. Late last month, we signed onto Performancing. Although their tagline is "Helping Bloggers Succeed", it's useful for all sites like our Digital Camera Reviews site which is not a blog. I had been meaning to write a blog entry about it but by coincidence, today, I noticed that Performancing has a blog entry up that will provide pMetrics free for 12 months for a review. Great timing!

Although I think Google Analytics is pretty complete, the additional features of Performancing are a really good companion to Analytics. Here's a walkthrough of Performancing.

First of all, when you go to Performancing.com, it takes you to their blog. I don't quite understand that. The value of their site is in pMetrics, not the blog! They should really take you to the value part of their site by default. Instead, you have to click a top link (labelled "pMetrics") to even find the good stuff (not that the blog is bad at all).

Like Google Analytics or HitTail or other tracking sites, Performancing is very easy to set up. You just need to include a bit of javascript code to every page on your site.

Performancing has a very nice comparison chart giving you a feature comparison between pMetrics and Analytics, SiteMeter, StatCounter, Mint, and Feedburner.


While there are quite a few features that are great, my favorites are:

• Daily Top 10 (pages, incoming links, and searches)
• "Actions" per user (you can see how many things people do or how many pages people visit on your site)
• Spy - a real-time view of your users

The stats are displayed very differently than Analytics. I think they are laid out in a very intuitive way and let's you see individual users vs. the whole trend (unlike Analytics). You are always shown the time, the action (or number of actions), the page(s) hit and most important to us, the referer.

The Spy feature is the best feature. It's constantly updated so you can literally follow along and see users move through your site. In this way, I noticed a few users do searches on ProductCritic that didn't return any links (I saw them try the search in different ways "SD 500", "500", "SD500"). What was odd about this was that I knew ProductCritic has reviews for the Canon SD500. Looking into it more, we found a problem with our search code that was easy to fix. Without looking at the Performancing data, we might not have noticed the problem for quite awhile.

It's much harder (if not nearly impossible) to track and follow individual users through their experience on your site via Analytics. That's why I think Performancing has done a great job with pMetrics and I can only hope that they have planned well enough so that their site scales to a large number of users without the stats gathering breaking down.

Most Insane Tourist Photographer Ever

I've travelled fairly extensively and as a tourist, you know that you usually only have a limited time in any one spot and you want to get the best photos that you can.

When I read this post about an ultimate crazy cameraman at the Grand Canyon, it was hard for me to even imagine what must be going on in this guy's mind to go to these lengths to get a shot (especially when it looks like you don't really need to - why not just take the shot on the higher outcropping?) The shot below is the crazy cameraman's leap to the safer rock...with camera and tripod in his left hand.


Luckily, DigiSniper added a PS at the bottom of the post that gives you the whole story. Great stuff!

Cell Phone Market Growth Slowing In 2007

Cell phone sales growth increased by 10% in the first quarter of 2007 over the same quarter in 2006. Still, this healthy 10% growth could not keep up with the previous quarter.

IDC has published a new press release showing that so far, 2007 probably won't keep up with the record cell phone sales of 2006 which saw an amazing 20% year-on-year growth in each quarter of that year. The release states, "this reflects IDC's expectations that as more subscribers are added to the network, fewer new subscribers are left to be added".

The release also provides the Top 5 Cell Phone vendors in this order:

1. Nokia
2. Motorola
3. Samsung
4. Sony Ericsson
5. LG Electronics

Samsung and Sony Ericsson benefitted from Motorola's missteps by posting a year-on-year growth with Sony Ericsson showing the largest growth. It's interesting to compare this to ProductCritic's cell phone reviews. While Samsung phones have only had quite average reviews, the latest crop of Sony Ericsson phones are mostly getting quite good marks from the professional reviewers. With Nokia still holding a 30%+ market share, we'll be shoring up the number of Nokia reviews we have on ProductCritic.

Top 10 Digital Camera Mistakes

The Photo Mentor has a post describing the Top 10 Digital Camera Mistakes. I'm summarizing below:

1. More Pixels Doesn't Mean Better Pictures
2. Don't Use Digital Zoom
3. Take The Highest Resolution Pics You Can
4. Have An Extra Battery
5. Optical Viewfinder Isn't What The Camera Sees
6. Be A Tripod
7. The LCD Is Misleading
8. More Pixels Are Better At High ISO
9. You Can't Always Fix In Photoshop
10. Printing At Home Doesn't Save Money

Most of these mistakes are geared towards people who have just bought their first digital camera (how many of you are there?) but I think everyone should pay attention to mistake #10 as it's easy to think that you should print out all your pics just because today's printer, ink, and paper produce such great results.

The Latest Top 10 Cell Phone Rankings From PC World

PC World has recently updated their Top 10 Cell Phones. Here they are listed below along with the score given by PC World and the ProductCritic Score:

1. RIM Blackberry Pearl - 85 (ProductCritic Score = 83)
2. Sony Ericsson W810 - 84 (ProductCritic Score = 87)
3. Motorola RIZR Z3 - 83 (ProductCritic Score = 75)
4. Mororola RAZR V3i - 81 (ProductCritic Score = 81)
5. Samsung SCH-u740 - 81
6. Nokia 5300 - 80 (ProductCritic Score = 82)
7. Sony Ericsson W300i - 80 (ProductCritic Score = 79)
8. LG EnV - 79 (ProductCritic Score = 81)
9. T-Mobile SDA - 79
10. Samsung UpStage - 79

Except for the Motorola RIZR, the ratings given by PC World sync up pretty well with the aggregate scores from ProductCritic.

The front of my cell phone is all cracked up so I'm looking to get a new one. I'm really impressed by the latest Sony Ericsson phones and am thinking about the Sony W810i. But, I've had a Motorola phone of one type or another for quite awhile now though so I'm kind of invested in their OS and menu system etc. The RIZR is a really good looking phone but the professional reviews of it are only average.

Vote For The Best Camera Of 2006

Go to Engadget to vote for the Digital Camera of the Year in the 2006 Engadget Awards.

The choices are:
1) Canon 400D/Rebel XTi (ProductCritic Score=85)
2) Canon SD800 (ProductCritic Score=81)
3) Nikon D80 (ProductCritic Score=91)
4) Panasonic Lumix DMC-L1 (ProductCritic Score=79)
5) Sony Alpha 100 (ProductCritic Score=83)
6) Sony HDR-SR1 (ProductCritic Score=88)

So far, the results look like the Rebel XTi has a very slight edge over the Nikon D80 (even though the reviews show that the D80 is a better camera).

You have until midnight, Monday, April 16 to cast your vote so head on over and do that.

Setting Up A Startup - It's So Easy Now!

I am constantly amazed at the high quality of many open source projects. I've worked on a number of them myself and can understand some of the reasons why people contribute free time to the projects but it still amazes me at the quality of some projects. This post gives you a general idea of all the tools we used to create our startup.

When we built ProductCritic we took advantage of as much open source software as we could to reduce our upfront costs.

As mentioned in an earlier post the site runs a virtual private server. It's running Ubuntu Server using Lighttpd as the frontend webserver and FastCGI to run the Rails applications. Eventually this will be upgraded to use Mongrel and possibly Apache but the current system is working fine in our environment and I see no reasons to change it at the present.

We are using PostgreSQL as the database server for no other reason than I prefer it to MySQL. For the type of application that ProductCritic is, (Digital Camera Reviews) either database server would be fine.

Subversion was used as our revision control system for code. A custom script runs every night on the server to backup the Subversion repository, PostgreSQL database and uploaded files. These are then downloaded to my personal server. If our server vanished we would be up and running in a few hours on a new server with the only the data of the current day being lost.

The site is deployed using Capistrano that uses a custom script I wrote for a previous site to manage the FastCGI processes.

Google Analytics is used to give us our stats.

The site was programmed using Ruby on Rails on a MacBook using TextMate and the Terminal.

We used a free Basecamp account to organize our task list and archive useful messages. During development I found that to be quite motivating in checking off our long lists of tasks and seeing them completed. We used a Writeboard to compose our launch announcement which worked out quite well as a number of people collaborated on that document.

It really is very easy (and inexpensive) to create a Startup on the Internet now. Focus on your great idea, gather some friends (or do it yourself) and go for it!

Beginner's Guide To Buying A Digital Camera

We've previously talked about what to look for when buying a Digital SLR camera but what if you've just started looking for a regular digital camera? (Although, with over 30 million digital cameras sold in 2006, there's less and less people who are just jumping into the digital camera market for the first time).

If you need a beginner's primer on buying a digital camera, Tech2.com has a pretty simple beginner's guide.

I've bought a few digital cameras and the best advice I can give is to go to the store and try it out (even if you're going to buy it online). You want to see how it feels in your hand and you want to try the basic functions (startup, viewing pictures, movies, deleting, menu options). The way the buttons are placed on the camera may just not work with your hands and fingers.

Finally, look on ProductCritic to see what the professional reviewers say about image quality and how the cameras you're interested in stack up to each other.

Canon Elph - Which One To Buy?

Even if you're a Canon fan, buying one of their ultracompact cameras in the Digital Elph line can be confusing and frustrating. There are so many of these models to choose from, each with their own set of features.

CNET has recently posted an article about making a choice amongst the Canon Digital Elph cameras. They also have a side-by-side comparison of five of the models. I've listed them below with their CNET rating along with their ProductCritic Scores:

• Canon PowerShot SD1000 (CNET=7.8)
• Canon PowerShot SD900 (CNET=7.6 ProductCritic Score=82)
• Canon PowerShot SD800 IS (CNET=7.8 ProductCritic Score=81)
• Canon PowerShot SD750 (CNET=7.8 ProductCritic Score=80)
• Canon PowerShot SD600 (CNET=7.8 ProductCritic Score=83)

CNET's conclusion is that if money is no object, buy the SD800 IS but if cost matters, get the SD600.

All the reviews for the cameras are so close that you'll probably be happy purchasing any of them. I also have a Digital Elph (the PowerShot SD500 - ProductCritic Score=85) and I'm fairly happy with it. It takes pretty good pictures, has great video and is certainly small enough for me to carry around wherever I go without noticing it too much.

Looks like we'll have to aggregate the reviews for the SD1000 on ProductCritic soon. If you're looking to purchase it quickly, leave a comment and we'll get it up on the site the same day.

Google Adsense Optimization Team

Logging into ProductCritic's Adsense account today, I saw a new section called "Recent Messages" with a message from the "Optimization Team". Given that the date of the message was April 1, I almost thought that it was going to be some sort of April Fool's joke.

Looks like Google automatically reviewed ProductCritic and here's the help they are providing:

"You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site".

When I dig deeper, it says that I am filtering ads and that if I filter less ads, I could increase my revenue. That's all well and good but unlike Google, I hate Made-For-Ads sites. I don't want visitors to ProductCritic to click on them and basically waste their time. I really don't care that it could "increase my revenue" if I didn't filter them.

If more and more sites actually filtered these Made-For-Ads sites, would they start to disappear? Probably not but we're going to do our part to make the Internet a little bit better.

The BEST And ONLY Digital SLR Buyer's Guide You Will Need

Running a site like ProductCritic, I read a lot about digital cameras. It's hard not to get almost bored (or at least unaffected) with some of the articles out there and it becomes a rare occurance when I sit up and really take notice.

Here's one of those times. I'm nearly speechless by how good this article is by Gear Digest (the same network of sites that is part of Tom's Hardware Guide) providing a Buyer's Guide to Digital SLR's which includes details and comparisons on 26 DSLR cameras. The article is so good because it gives you a really detailed explanation of many aspects of DSLRs like sensor types, lenses supported, and shutter speeds and how each aspect will apply to your final purchase decision.

Finally, the article ends with a comprehensive features chart comparing all 26 DSLRs against each of the aspects that the article described previously. Great work!

So, if you're in the market for a new DSLR or are a beginner looking to move up to your first Digital SLR, then do yourself a favor and read the Buyer's Guide. Barry Gerber, the author deserves acknowledgement of a great, well written, article.