Do It Yourself www.doityourself.com
For those of you living in an old broken-down apartment or dorm,
doityourself.com is the Web site to visit. With the slogan,
“When You Want It Done Right … DoItYourself.com,” it
offers an amazing wealth of information ranging from the mundane to
the marvelous, regarding home and garden-related problems and
projects. Its detailed sections include building and remodeling,
repair (great for simple apartment problems), decoration, outdoors
and lifestyle. Each section has a number of subsections that can be
accessed easily. Although not visually appealing, doityourself.com
makes up for it many times over by having enough text information
to make the common “do-it-yourself-er” dizzy. Simple
pictures and diagrams, along with detailed step-by-step
instructions outline most projects, and can help guide those who
know nothing about home related maintenance. Have an ant
infestation in your room? Try washing the place down with a water
and vinegar solution. Want to know how to install a new lock on
your door, or how to clean chrome, or how to make compost? The
answers to all these questions can be found on this one Web site.
Unfortunately, with so much information about home and garden care,
finding specifically what you want can be difficult. Perhaps the
best feature of the Web site is being able to find a book that
suits your needs, and can answer your questions even better than
the Web site. Despite its minor flaws, doityourself.com is a useful
Web site for your your typical home crisis and could be a useful
tool for students as well. David Jones Rating: 8
Movielens www.movielens.org
If you’ve ever come out of a really good movie wondering
why there aren’t more quality films like it out there, then
you should enter the world of movielens.org. This user-friendly Web
site is a utopia for budding movie buffs. The way it works is
similar to many other cinematic Internet sites. First, you log in
(the log-in process is free, anonymous and takes a total of about
2.5 seconds). Next, you rate a couple of lists of movies on a scale
of one to five, to give the site an idea of your taste in movies.
Although the minimum number to rate is five movies, it would be a
much better idea to rate at least 10. It does not take long at all
and it makes browsing the site much more effective when they have a
rough idea of your personal preferences. Besides, don’t most
people wish they could be movie critics for a day, instead of
blindly following the direction that Roger Ebert decides to point
his thumb? In one instance, after submitting only five ratings, the
site gave a list of new releases that the user might enjoy and none
of them even had titles that could be pronounced, much less
recognized. Nevertheless, after doing several more reviews it
starts to get interesting. If you keep rating films after the first
five, the site begins to come up with predicted ratings that it
guesses the user would give to certain films. The ratings that it
comes up with are actually surprisingly accurate (of course there
is the occasional slip-up, such as telling someone who loved
“When Harry Met Sally” and “Casablanca” to
go out and see “10 Things I Hate About You”). Still,
after a while, you find yourself inadvertently jotting down the
names of films to see when you get a chance. Another refreshing
aspect of the lists of movies the site comes up with is that it
does a good job of mixing big-budget Hollywood releases with
smaller indie films and foreign films, as well as covering the time
spectrum ““ from “Gone With the Wind” to
“Gladiator.” Many of the films also come with reviews
for both the movie itself and for the DVD version. Although the DVD
reviews are definitely helpful, the film reviews tend to reveal a
bit too much information. A better option for info on the film is
simply to click on the title of the movie itself (which
subsequently tells you everything you have ever wanted to know
about both the film itself, as well as about every single person
who had anything to do with the film). Clicking on the title gives
a very brief plot summary with the option for more information if
you are so inclined. Besides being a fun place to explore potential
films, Movielens is also an amazingly in-depth place to search for
movies, actor biographies and any possible kind of movie
merchandise. Whatever services are not rendered by the site itself
are easily accessible by the many links provided. There isn’t
much wrong with the Web site. Whether you’re just browsing
through some movies or you have a specific fact you want to look
up, it would be well worth your time to check out movielens.org.
Leila Mobayen Rating: 9
Listen www.listen.com
After countless suits involving Napster and MP3.com, San
Francisco-based Listen.com offers a completely legal alternative.
The title of the main page reads “Listen.com: Your guide to
MP3s and more.” Listen.com is nothing more than a directory
to aid in the search for downloadable music which narcissistically
compares itself to Yahoo. If you plan on listening to a song more
than once, it is recommended that you take advantage of the free
registration, which, when logged in, allows the user to bookmark
artist pages. The registration consists only of choosing a user
name and password, and then entering a zip code and e-mail address.
Most of the multimedia is free of charge, although many of the
sites Listen.com points you to charge for MP3s (Listen.com has more
partners than Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”). The
bulk of artist matches are streaming music videos (not
downloadable), and not of good quality. So you wanna be a deejay?
Ever dreamed of becoming the next David Morales, Junior Vasquez or
Funkmaster Flex? Well, Listen.com gives you the opportunity with
Mixman, which you can easily download from the site, to remix songs
by Smash Mouth (“All Star”), Aphrodite (“B.M.
Funkster”) and Moby (“Bodyrock”). After you are
done, you can send your piece of musical genius to all your friends
by simply clicking on the “send mix” button on the
bottom of the screen. Listen.com claims to be the guide to MP3s,
yet, in one instance the only song a user was able to download (for
free), after three hours of surfing, was 2Ge+her’s
“You’re My Baby Girl.” The killer was that this
file was not even an MP3. The only artist on the site’s Top
10 list that has a “free” MP3 is Shania Twain, and when
the user clicked on the link to go to it, surprise! The
“Listen.com partner” (Musicmatch.com) added the song to
her shopping basket for $1. Ninety-nine percent of the multimedia
you will find on this site is streaming video. Do not expect to
surf this site and find downloads, because there aren’t very
many, and they are few and far between. The site is also not
updated very often, as you can look up Britney Spears and have 27
matches and then click on the link to a particular partner (for
example Launch.com) and find “Oops! I Did It Again,”
which was not originally cataloged. Listen.com also lacks material
by established artists. A search for Mariah Carey yielded a mere
two results, both of which were the same “When You
Believe” video from the same host site. At first glance this
phenomenon seems to be the result of disinterested record companies
and lack of legal music files, which is not the case, as music
giants BMG, Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony Music (Carey’s
label) are all investors. Sure, Listen.com has MP3’s, but you
can only listen to them via streaming audio. If you want to
download MP3 files, you have to buy them, so the site is definitely
not geared toward college students. Don’t uninstall Napster
any time soon: better yet, wait until the Recording Industry
Association of America wins the court battle, because Listen.com is
still riding the bench in the MP3-savvy market. Dria Fearn Rating:
4