This Camera Was Really Dirty

A friend of mine sent me this picture (not of him) of someone cleaning their dirty camera. Looks like I've been using the wrong method to clean my camera.



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Will It Blend? Camcorder Episode

I think the Will It Blend? videos from Blendtec are a must-see. One of the best uses of YouTube I can think of...dangerous stuff with appliances that you wouldn't want to do at home.

Since we have camcorder reviews on ProductCritic, I thought I'd post a link up to the Will It Blend? video where they blend a camcorder. The results are amazing (as are all the results from anything they blend).

What is even funnier is that they actually brought the blended results back to the store to try and get the warranty back on it. Unfortunately, they had to remove that video from the actual Blendtec site but it can still be found on YouTube.

Does anyone know what model of Sony camcorder is he blending?

Almost 100 Online Photography Resources

I don't know why I didn't post this when I read it but last month Mashable had a great post for photography buffs like us that listed 90+ Online Photography Tools & Resources.

Read their post for the full list, but here are my favorites in each category:

Online Photo Editors:
Fauxto - The closest you can get to Photoshop online because it provides support for layers.
Phixr - Not just editing but supports uploads to Flickr, Fotopic, Livejournal, Photobucket, and others.

Photo Sharing:
Flickr - Everyone is using it anyways...
SlideShare - I love how easy they make it to embed a slideshow on your own page.

Free Photo Hosting:
Photobucket - MySpace's favorite.
AllYouCanUpload - Like the name says, no limit to image size you can upload.

Photography Blogs:
DPreview - One of the sites that ProductCritic summarizes reviews from. Still good after being bought by Amazon earlier this year. Not exactly just a blog.

Mashups:
Colr Pickr - Allows you to search Flickr photos based on their color. This one is fantastic!

Mobile:
Shozu - Upload to Flickr from your phone.

Photo Mixing and Slideshows:
Mixercast - All the ones listed in the category are good but this one stood out for me.

Photo Printing/Book Creation:
I didn't like the ones Mashable listed. I prefer Blurb and MyPublisher.

Photo Search:
Besides Google's Image Search, these ones stood out for finding stock or public domain photos - Yotophoto & EveryStockPhoto.

Stock Photos:
Alamy - Over 9 million photos to search through.
Stock.xchng - Only 300K photos but they're free.

Guy Gets Kicked Off From Amazon. Loses $400.

Just read this really simple post about a guy who just got booted from Amazon's Affiliate program and lost out on the $400 in commissions that he had already accumulated.

Although ProductCritic participates in Amazon's Affiliate program, it is not a material part of the sites revenue. How unimportant is it? How about less than $20 in affiliate commissions so far this whole year!

I'm not sure why the revenue (and clicks) from Amazon is so low. To be fair, we have mainly put in Amazon links because they have a lot of good general information about each camera, camcorder, and cell phone and is a good place for our visitors to view the features of a product (but not necessarily the reviews).

Because we think the Amazon links are helpful for our visitors, we're going to keep the links available but I'm seriously thinking about using a different affiliate partner.

Anyone have any good ideas?

3 Kinds Of Successful Adsense Sites? At Least ProductCritic Is One

Eric Giguere (the author of a couple Adsense books that I haven't read yet), has a post up on his Make Easy Money With Google And Adsense blog entitled "The 3 Kinds Of Successful Adsense Sites".

In summary, the three types he lists are:

1. The Experience Site - a site that describes your personal experience with something.
   
2. The Clarification Site - a site to better explain a topic.
   
3. The Compilation Site - a site that organizes information and links to relevant websites.
   

ProductCritic is definitely the third type of site that Eric lists. To quote his post,

"The best compilation sites have lots of links to other sites. They're not afraid of external linking, and they're all the more useful because of it. It may seem counterproductive because each link out is one more chance of losing the visitor (and hence any potential ad clicks) but it’s the links that make the site valuable to the visitor in the first place and that draw in the traffic."

I can't believe how well Eric describes our philosophy for ProductCritic (even though he's probably never visited the site). Although we are making some money from Adsense and from Chitika ads, we're actually more focused on making ProductCritic the best consumer electronics review summary site that we can. After all, we created it because we wanted a site like that for ourselves! We're not worried about losing visitors to other links...that's why they're supposed to visit the site in the first place.

Remember, you can make the site more useful for everyone by letting us know of reviews that we've missed or products that we don't have review summaries for yet.

ProductCritic Has Most Extensive List Of iPhone Reviews

ProductCritic's Cell Phone Reviews now lists 18 reviews for the Apple iPhone. I think we have the most extensive list of reviews you will find anywhere.

Currently, the iPhone has a ProductCritic score of 87 which puts it tied for best rated phone on the site along with the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Sony Ericsson W810i.

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Super Cool Do-It-Yourself Tripod That's Better Than Mine

I have one of those cheap bendable tripods that you can get for your point-and-shoot camera. I've seen the Gorillapod which looks to be a pretty good improvement on my cheaper version.

I saw this video on creating a cool do-it-yourself tripod though that doesn't look as pretty but would do a much better job than my cheap tripod and would also work for my camcorder. Even better than that is that it costs about $1 in materials and about 10 minutes of your time to make (if you're not very handy with tools).

ProductCritic's Apple iPhone Review Roundup

We've just posted all the current Apple iPhone reviews up on our main consumer electronics review site. At this time, not surprisingly (given the hype surrounding the iPhone), it is the highest rated phone on ProductCritic (just barely edging out the Sony Ericsson K800i).

Most of the reviews are from the main stream press (like USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and CNET). Over the next few weeks, I'd expect the real in-depth reviews from the more tech-centric sites.