1. Mint.com is a highly addictive money management site. You can quickly see where you’re spending, where you can save, and where you can earn higher interest.
Mint is by far the coolest way to track your spending online. It’s is completely free, and it takes about 5 minutes to import your bank accounts, after which it spurts out a clean pie chart of your spending trends. I had no idea until I signed up for Mint that I spend about 20% more than people in SF eating out at restaurants, or that my most frequent merchant is Trader Joes 
. There are all kinds of interesting nuggets you would never know about your spending habits! You can see how hundreds of Twitter users are benefiting from Mint.com as well.
It also showed me banks that would give me 2-3% higher interest than I’m currently getting! I don’t know anybody who has the patience to purchase and use Microsoft Money and all those other bland financial software tools, but Mint is sure to attract the masses as they continue to make financial tracking and budgeting fun .
2. Gas Prices from MSN Auto : Type in your zip code and find the cheapest gas locations in your area, the average gas price, and the highest price. It’s also updated every night. The difference between the cheapest and most expensive gas in our zip code in SF is 70 cents! You’d save a good $14 on a full 20 gallon tank of gas.
3. Read reviews on Buzzillions of course . Chances are you’ve bought something for a great price, but it just didn’t cut it. Eeither it broke, or the quality was so bad it was unusable, or it just didn’t meet your expecatations. Reading reviews from actual owners of the product on Buzzillions can help you get the best bang for the buck. You never know afterall, since even the best brands out there don’t always produce the best products .
As I was browsing through Buzzillions last night, I found a bunch of products made by top brands and was pretty surpised to see how poorly rated some of these were! It goes to show that even if a product is made by a brand you know and trust, they can still be huge disappointments.
1. Black & Decker 12 Cup Coffee Maker: 2.4 stars/ 5
Although Black & Decker is a well known and trusted brand, this particular coffe maker is a definite bust! Several people said it ended up leaving “a counter top covered in hot coffee,” and that this model is terrible compared to previous models since they’ve “finally cheapened it to the point of not being usable.”
2. Kodak EasyShare M883 Digital Camera: 2.8 stars/ 5
Even Kodak doesn’t always get everything right! Although it looks pretty sleek, the “picture quality is digusting .” Also, don’t plan on taking pictures indoors since the “camera is not usable in low light areas,” and pictures turn out “grainy.”
3. Magellan Crossover GPS Unit: 3.1 stars/ 5
Reading the reviews, this Magellan GPS system has pissed a lot of people off. I mean, if you had to “spend another $150+ to add the software to make it do what it says it does.” A few people weren’t even satsified with the basic necessities of GPS system as it “responds slowly, plans poorly, has multiple misspelled road names, including freeway names, and is grossly out of date with the maps. ”
The other day Robert Scoble wrote a pretty good post about how some companies like Twitter gets a disproportionate amount of blog coverage compared to other companies like Meebo (who has a significant amount more engagement and traffic than Twitter) and is under represented.
His very realistic theory was that Twitter is a tool most bloggers actively use, thus have a strong bias to cover the company frequently, while Meebo isn’t a tool most technology centric writers use. The disappointing thing about this truth is that readers don’t get a diversity of startup and technology news, since the top bloggers end up covering the same story about every single (often uninteresting) move Twitter makes.
Recently we got coverage on VentureBeat “PowerReviews aims to become the AdSense of product reviews” which highlighted our goal to be the OS for retailers of every size to collect customer reviews. It got a decent amount of pickup, but it was definitely no $999.99 for “I am Rich” iPhone app story.
What do you think about the news, analysis, and coverage of technology in the blogosphere?
On Tuesday Google Insights launched, a tool you can use to “See what the world is searching for.” I played around with different keywords to realize that there are so many possibilities with this tool for marketers, advertisers, and any company with a desire to understand search behavior to choose advertising messaging, seasonal planning, follow product/brand trends, and on and on.
A great example on their “How can I use Google Insights for Search?” page, they showed how while “fuel efficiency” is a growing concern for people, “car safety” gets a significant amount of interest which an auto advertiser would want to include in advertising campaigns:
I can think of many ways for Buzzillions to take advantage of this tool from buying keywords, to messaging, and seasonal features in the future..back to school is right around the corner!
Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip wrote a great post today highlighting our success metrics which helped us win the Innovative Publisher of the Year Award.
Take a read to see some interesting stats about our best performing affiliate partners including OneStepAhead, BiggerBras, REI, and Overstock (in that order), our conversion rate, and our performance rank in affiliate networks.
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